The embodied meanings of towards and against Two English prepositions from a cognitive and contrastive linguistics perspective

Abstract

This is a study of semantic differences in the use of the English prepositions towards and against analysed in terms of cognitive linguistics. The data for this analysis is provided by a selection of 120 sentence examples from the British National Corpus, BNC. The constructions with these prepositions are viewed as conceptualizations known as spatial scenes. In accordance with the method developed in cognitive linguistics spatial scenes are analysed by means of the trajector and landmark concepts. The following general distinctions between the spatial scenes associated with towards and against have been found: the identified meanings of towards are associated with scenes in which the trajector is bound to the landmark in different ways by a path. The identified meanings of against are associated with scenes in which the trajector is bound to the landmark by different types of relations of force and non-physical opposition. At the same time, the semantic relations between these prepositions can be difficult to distinguish, especially when it comes to abstract meanings. The presumption that there is a significant semantic overlap between towards and against and that both prepositions can be rendered by the Swedish preposition mot, which can be confusing for Swedish learners of English, was tested in a contrastive analysis of data provided by the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus, ESPC. The corpus-based data analysis has confirmed the fact that there is a significant semantic overlap between towards and against as this is manifest in the translation of the two prepositions with their Swedish equivalent mot.