Colloque

The potential significance and the prototype of a case: exploring the Polish locative

Barbara Bacz

Membre a labase

Barbara Bacz

Résumé du colloque

In contemporary Slavic the locative is always rendered by the combination of a preposition and the locative case morpheme. It is postulated, following the suggestions made by Kempf 1978, Janda 1993 and Guillaume 1992, that a single (potential ?) meaning can be proposed for this case in spite of a broad variety of prepositions (o = about, w = in, na = on, przy = next to, etc.) the locative morpheme cooccurs with in discourse. An analysis of the sample data from Polish will be carried out to determine to what extent the various prepositional uses are unified. The possibility of positing an abstract prototypical centre (in the cognitive linguistics sense of this term as represented by Janda 1993) for the locative case category in Polish will be explored, and if possible, a Guillaumean potential significate for the Polish locative will be suggested. It is maintained that a unified network model of the locative prepositional uses is needed before the potential significate for the locative case category can be proposed.