Abstract :
[en] Adpositions tend to be highly polyfunctional. While some approaches to lexical semantics search for abstract basic meanings, recent research indicates that polysemy is probably a more insightful analysis of the one-to-many form-function mappings associated with adpositions (e.g. Hagège 2008, Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2008, Grossman and Polis 2012). The recent burst of work on semantic maps (see e.g. the special number of Linguistic Discovery 8/1, 2010) has provided a useful tool for evaluating the empirical validity of polysemy. The aim of the present paper is to examine an aspect of the semantics of adposition borrowing, focusing on the extent to which polysemy networks associated with a source-language adposition are borrowed. Taking the Greek-origin adposition κατά (Luraghi 2003, Bortone 2010) in Coptic as a test-case, I show that adpositions are usually not borrowed with their entire polysemy networks. In order to demonstrate this point, I build a semantic map of the spatial (motion from, downwards, towards, etc.), temporal (extension, duration) and conceptual senses (conformity, comparison, cause, distributive, iterative) covered by the preposition κατά in Greek, based on existing semantic maps and additional typological evidence. Thanks to this map, it is possible to ground a contrastive analysis of the senses associated with the preposition κατά in Greek, on the one hand, and with kata in two Coptic dialects, on the other. In terms of adposition borrowing, the semantic maps method allows one to show (1) that a small part of the polysemy network associated with the preposition in Greek is borrowed, (2) that spatial meanings are hardly borrowed, while conceptual ones can easily be, (3) that the polysemy network of kata in Coptic is fairly different from one dialect to another. This, in turns leads to an interesting question, which can be evaluated empirically: do the ways in which adpositions are borrowed shed light on the Connectivity Hypothesis associated with semantic maps?
