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Have you ever stopped to consider how we use prepositions in language? Sometimes prepositions play unexpected roles. The English preposition on, for example, helps you talk about “putting a book on a shelf” or “hanging a picture on the wall”, and that despite the fact that shelves are horizontal and walls are vertical. The word “on” can do a lot more:

• You can be on your guard in the dark at night.
• You make sure that a conversation stays on topic.
• Your car can die on you.
• Sometimes work puts a lot of pressure on you.
• A bank robber might draw a gun on the bank teller.
• If that happens, the onus is on the thief to make it right.

All these ways that the preposition on gets used in our everyday speech come from the interaction of forces. In English we have all sorts of conventions where the pressure or weight of one object (the trajector) on top of another object (the landmark) becomes a useful metaphor for talking about our daily lives. If I say, “My car died on me” you understand that I am experiencing a burden of one kind or another. The car’s failure to start is construed as a downward force experienced by me the speaker. Maybe I didn’t make it to my doctor’s appointment. Maybe I am facing the financial burden of fixing the car. Maybe I was stranded and had to walk home in traffic.

These kinds of abstract expressions and usages of the English preposition “on” are possible because this preposition and concurrently the Greek preposition ἐπί both function as force-dymaic prepositions rather than simply spatial prepositions. As a semantic category, force dynamics refers to the interaction of forces, counterforces, and causal relations (Talmy 2000). Consider the following example involving ἐπί.

1. καὶ ἔλαβεν Σαοὺλ [TR] τὴν ῥομφαίαν καὶ ἐπέπεσεν ἐπʼ αὐτήν [LM].
   Saul [TR] took his sword and fell on it [LM] (LXX 1 Chronicles 10:4).

There is a spatial component to the statements in ‎(1). Saul is in a position over his sword and falls in the direction of the sword from above. However, there is also a key force-dynamic aspect to each expression. Saul in ‎(1) is reliant on the force of gravity as he falls downward onto his sword. His sword provides a counterforce or opposing force that when pressed against via gravity pierces him through. The opposing force of one object against another results in Saul’s death.

• The domain of space involves location, direction, configuration, and movement.
• The domain of force involves cause, control, effect, and interaction (Talmy 2000, Zwarts 2010).

The study of force dynamics seeks to understand how causal concepts that involve force are represented in language and cognition. Its origins lie in Cognitive Linguistics, especially the work of Leonard Talmy (1981, 1985, 1988) and Eve Sweetser (1982, 1984, 1990). The force domain captures a naïve metaphysics of how we, as humans, experience everyday forces through embodied interactions, including the interplay of applying forces, resisting forces, overcoming forces, and removing forces, as well as the source, direction, and magnitude of forces present in a scene (Wolff 2017, Copley 2019, de Mulder 2021). A growing number of scholars recognize the importance of force dynamics in the analysis of prepositions (Dewell 1994, Bowerman 1996, Garrod, Ferrier, & Campbell 1999, Tyler & Evans 2001, Zwarts 2010, R. Aubrey 2022). Indeed, prepositions are implicated in force dynamics by nature of their function of locating a trajector entity relative to a landmark entity (Beliën 2002, Gärdenfors 2014, 2015, 2020). The way these two entities interact, whether in terms of motion, location, or other arrangements, may naturally be motivated by force dynamics as a result of our embodied experiences.

Our experiential capacity allows us to recognize that we can counteract the downward pull of gravity with stable surfaces and foundations. This knowledge allows us to produce (and talk about) such an equilibrium of forces. It may seem as though this is merely an elaborate way of saying: “Humans place things on top of other things.” But in contexts far less dynamic than Saul’s death, it is the force dynamics that are key to comprehension rather than spatial orientation. Jesus’s story of the wise and foolish men building houses may be illustrative.

2. Πᾶς οὖν ὅστις ἀκούει μου τοὺς λόγους τούτους καὶ ποιεῖ αὐτούς ὁμοιωθήσεται ἀνδρὶ φρονίμῳ ὅστις ᾠκοδόμησεν αὐτοῦ τὴν οἰκίαν [TR] ἐπὶ τὴν πέτραν [LM]
   Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house [TR] on the rock [LM] (Mt 7:24).
3. καὶ πᾶς ὁ ἀκούων μου τοὺς λόγους τούτους καὶ μὴ ποιῶν αὐτοὺς ὁμοιωθήσεται ἀνδρὶ μωρῷ ὅστις ᾠκοδόμησεν αὐτοῦ τὴν οἰκίαν [TR] ἐπὶ τὴν ἄμμον [LM].
   And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house [TR] on the sand [LM] (Mt 7:26).

In (2)–(3), spatial orientation plays little role in understanding Jesus’s point. Instead, it is the effectiveness of the landmarks rock and sand to counteract the destructive force of the storm that grounds the meaning of Jesus’s teaching. High quality foundations counteract external forces efficaciously. They are good for stacking things. Low quality foundations succumb to those same forces and fail. They are bad for stacking things. It is the capacity of the rock and the sand as counterforces against the storm that motivates Jesus’s teaching.

Force and counterforce defines the interaction of one house with the rock and another house with the sand. The nature of the landmark (the object of the preposition—rock and sand) plays a role in the effect experienced by the trajector (the houses). Landmarks are not merely about locations where things exist on them. Because they exert a stabilizing (or not so stabilizing) counterforce, they also have causal effects upon whatever is place upon them.

In the next few posts in the coming weeks as we look toward SBL in Boston, we’ll be discussing how these forces affect the meaning of Greek prepositions in all sorts of ways.

Works cited:

Aubrey, Rachel E. 2022. “Exploring Perspective in Preposition Analysis.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Denver, CO, 20 November.

Beliën, Maaike. 2002. “Force Dynamics in Static Prepositions: Dutch Aan, Op, and Tegen.” In Hubert Cuyckens and Günter Radden (eds.), Perspectives on Prepositions, 195-210. Berlin, Boston: Max Niemeyer Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110924787.195.

Bowerman, Melissa. 1996. “Learning How to Structure Space for Language: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective.” In Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel, Merrill F. Garrett (eds.), Language and Space, 195-209. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Copley, Bridget. 2019 “Force dynamics.” In Robert Truswell (ed.), The Oxford handbook of event structure, 137–170. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

de Mulder, Walter. 2021. “Force dynamics.” Xu Wen and John R. Taylor (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 228–241. New York: Routledge.

Dewell, Robert B. 1994. “Over Again: Image-Schema Transformations in Semantic Analysis.” Cognitive Linguistics 5(4): 351-380.

Gärdenfors Peter. 2014. The Geometry of meaning: Semantics based on conceptual spaces. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gärdenfors, Peter. 2015. “The geometry of preposition meanings.” Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 10.1: 1–33.

Gärdenfors, Peter. 2020. “Comparing force prepositions with spatial prepositions.” Любословие 20: 92–107.

Sweetser, Eve. 1982. “Root and Epistemic Modals: Causality in Two Worlds.” In M. Macaulay and O. Gensler (eds.), Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 484-507.

Sweetser, Eve. 1984. “Semantic structure and semantic change: A cognitive linguistic study of modality, perception, speech acts, and logical relations.” Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 54. Cambridge University Press. 

Talmy, Leonard. 1981. “Force dynamics.” Paper presented at conference on Language and Mental Imagery. May 1981, University of California, Berkeley.

Talmy, Leonard., 1985. Force dynamics as a generalization over ‘causative’. Georgetown University round table on languages and linguistics, 67-85.

Talmy, Leonard. 1988. “Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition.” Cognitive Science, 12(1): 49-100.

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics Volume 1: Concept structuring systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tyler, Andrea & Vyvyan Evans. 2001. “Reconsidering Prepositional Polysemy Networks: The Case of over.” Language, 77, 724-765.

Wolff, Phillip. 2017. “Force Dynamics.” In Michael R. Waldmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning, 147-168. Oxford University Press.

Zwarts, Joost. 2010. “Forceful prepositions.” In V. Evans, & P. Chilton (eds.), Language, Cognition and Space: The State of the Art and New Directions, 193-214. Equinox Publishing.https://rjcmotorservices.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/break-down-recovery.png.webp