In November 2025 Rachel and Mike Aubrey presented on the ongoing work on Greek prepositions at the Cognitive Linguistics and Biblical Interpretation Section of the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting in Boston. The video above is a recorded version of that presentation. If you would also like to follow along with the slides, you can find them here:

The written version of the presentation has just been accepted for publication in the Journal of Translation (JOT). We will be sure to share that publication when it appears in the near future.

The presentation of this research was funded in part by a grant from the Pike Center for Integrative Scholarship (pikecenter.org).

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Force Dynamics, Image Schemas, and Constructional Polysemy in the Prepositions ἐπί and κατά in Postclassical Greek

Force is ubiquitous in daily life. We act and are acted upon by causal sequences that require the exertion of force. Typical force interactions shape our inferences about the world and how we communicate in language. You may not be cognizant of gravity, but you need only pick up an object and drop it to note its effects (Johnson 1987, 42). As a semantic category, force dynamics refers to the interaction of forces, counterforces, and causal relations. In this paper, we explore the force-dynamic aspects of Greek prepositions ἐπί and κατά. Consider the following examples for the prepositions ἐπί and κατά.

• 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).
• φοβούμενοί τε μή που κατὰ τραχεῖς τόπους [LM] ἐκπέσωμεν [TR] ἐκ πρύμνης ῥίψαντες ἀγκύρας τέσσαρας.
  Fearing that we [TR] might run aground against the rocks [LM], they dropped four anchors from the stern (Acts 27:29).

There is a spatial component to the statements in ‎(1) and ‎(2). Saul is in a position over his sword and falls in the direction of the sword from above. In Acts, Paul and his fellow travelers are on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea when they are caught in a storm. Their ship could run aground along the rocks, so they drop anchors from the stern to hold their location steady.

There is also a key force-dynamic aspect to each expression. Saul in ‎(1) relies on the force of gravity as he falls downward. 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. In Acts, example ‎(2), the force of the winds and water current compel the ship in one direction, but Paul and his compatriots fear that this path will splinter the ship against the rocks or at least end their journey quickly. The rocks supply a stabilizing counterforce to the storm that opposes the sweep of the waves as they crash against the land. It is when these two opposing forces meet that the ship could become compromised.

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

Force dynamics seeks to understand how causal concepts involving force are represented in language and cognition. Its origins lie in Cognitive Linguistics, especially the work of Talmy (1981, 1985, 1988) and Sweetser (1982, 1984, 1990). The force domain captures a naïve metaphysics of how humans experience everyday forces through embodied interactions, including the interplay of applying, resisting, overcoming, and removing forces, as well as the source, direction, and magnitude of forces present in a scene (Wolff 2017, Copley 2019, de Mulder 2021). Investigations into verbal semantics (Siskind 2001) and grammatical constructions (e.g., causatives [Talmy 2000], modality [Sweetser 1990, Boye 2005], subjunctives [García Yanes 2022], complement clauses, object-to-subject raising, and split infinitives [Hilpert 2025a]) illustrate the ways in which force is fundamental to language and cognition because it is fundamental to our lives. 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). Prepositions are implicated in force dynamics by nature of their function of locating a trajector entity relative to a landmark entity (Beliën 2002, Gärdenfors 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. This analysis examines how the human experience of forces, and efforts to counteract those forces structure the meaning of Greek prepositions in the physical realm and how force-dynamic patterns motivate usage in abstract domains. The prepositions ἐπί and κατά are commonly considered two of the more difficult prepositions to understand. They are used in a variety of contexts with English glosses that proliferate without apparent reason.

We suggest that force dynamics represents the unexplored, but essential element by which the diversity of these two prepositions may be accounted for in a cognitively plausible manner. We survey the language data for these two prepositions and discuss how force dynamics motivates and integrates into their semantics and usage in the video above.

Citations

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.

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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.

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

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García Yanes, Francisco Javier. 2022. Force dynamics as the path to the Spanish subjunctive. Cognitive Linguistics, 33(4), 767-800. https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2021-0130. 

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.

Garrod, Simon, Gillian Ferrier, & Siobhan Campbell. 1999. “‘In’ and ‘on’: Investigating the Functional Geometry of Spatial Prepositions.” Cognition 72 (2): 167-189.

Hilpert, Martin. 2025. “Force Dynamics in Unexpected Places.” Cognitive Semantics 11(1):1–35.

Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago Press. 

Siskind, Jeffrey Mark. 2001. “Grounding the Lexical Semantics of Verbs in Visual Perception using Force Dynamics and Event Logic.” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 15, 31-90.   

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.