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.
Ezra la Roi‘s work on various domains of modality (conditionals, insubordination, counterfactuals, and more) in Ancient Greek has […]
This picture is relevant. We promise. Have you ever stopped to consider how we use prepositions in language? […]
Over the past year, I’ve been off-and-on reading Julia Falk’s Women, Language and Linguistics: Three American Stories from […]
We, Rachel and Michael Aubrey, are giving an academic forum at Dallas International University on Thursday, July 31⋅12:30 […]
Dallas International University (DIU) has announced their new masters degree program that combines the biblical languages and linguistics in one place: MA in Biblical Languages and Linguistics.
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:
Nearly all major English translations in Acts 9:36 completely fail to communicate what the author of Acts is trying to do here: tell his readers that the name ‘Tabitha’ is a Aramaic word (טַבְיְתָא) that means ‘gazelle’. Luke’s audiences doesn’t want to know that two names correspond in an unknown way. Luke’s audience wants to know the meaning of Tabitha…
There are plenty of abstract uses of the preposition περί—the most comment is TOPIC with verbs of thought and communication. But with many other non-communication situations, the preposition περί often functions to express category structures. It’s spatial sense “Location Around” still provides the motivating image schema (CENTER-PERIPHERY), but reconstrued metaphorically as a point in conceptual space that affects actions or circumstances in its proximity around it.
Koine-Greek 