In November, we (Rachel and Michael Aubrey) presented the most recent piece of the ongoing research on Greek prepositions at SBL 2025 in Boston. Our paper was titled: Force Dynamics, Image Schemas, and Constructional Polysemy in Prepositions: ἐπί and κατά in Postclassical Greek.

Today we are making our notes and slides available from our SBL paper for your reading pleasure. Below are the details of our presentation, our slides, and then the abstract.

When we talk about the semantics of prepositional phrases, we are talking about a specific kind of conventionalized pattern. Conventional patterns are arbitrary in the sense that they are not predictable from one language to another. But in another way, they are nevertheless motivated (Sweetser 1990). There is a reason they occur as they do. Basic cognitive processes influence how different prepositions extend from spatial meanings to more abstract ones.

Last year, we shared our SBL paper from the Cognitive Linguistics session, “Constructions and the Source-Path-Goal Schema”. ventually, we realized that it was more practical to just upload the video as a whole. We only realized that we never shared the full video until today when a friend expressed appreciation to us for our paper. So without further ado, Constructions and the Source—Path—Goal Schema in its totality:

Rachel and I just submitted our manuscript of Greek prepositions in the New Testament: A Cognitive-Functional Description, 2nd edition!

We all love a good grammar or dictionary! If you work in Biblical or Postclassical Greek, you should absolutely have a copy of BDAG and probably a copy of von Siebenthal (2019) or Whitacre (2021), too! Still, there’s so much more to said about prepositions in this works!

We want readers to have a full picture of how our work on prepositions relates to standard teaching and reference works that are more familiar to you.