Prepositions

SBL2025 Prepositions, Constructions & Force Dynamics

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.

Constructions and the Source-Path-Goal Schema

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:

The preposition περί and cultural category structures

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.