On nouns functioning as prepositions

This paper analyzes semantic transformations of nouns functioning as prepositions. The semantic characteristics of prepositions are discussed, and Belic’ concept of adverbial origin and meaning of prepositions is reviewed. Contrary to usual perception that prepositions have mere grammatical meaning, it is concluded in this paper that they also have lexical meaning, like adverbs. Cognitive linguistics has so far dealt with lexical meanings of prepositions, and it is up to contemporary semantics to further explore and evolve this approach. Based on this fact that prepositions have lexical meaning, it is argued that nouns functioning as prepositions retain that lexical attribute though with different semantic value, rather than it adopts grammatical characteristics. It is concluded that semantic meaning of those nouns used as prepositions could be broken into two segments: adverbial (place) and nominal (partitive). The nouns which upon occasions may function as prepositions in Serbian language as a rule denote place and they always are used with genitive case (mostly partitive), and as a consequence they often have partitive meaning. In the sentences with nouns functioning as prepositions, the act expressed encompasses the part of the localizator or it is performed on its bounds, or near it. Which meaning would prevail depends on the noun, or verb, or noun in genitive case. A noun and its related preposition are treated as two lexemes in Serbian descriptive dictionaries, independent but close in meanings, since the preposition originated from a noun in a process defined by Irena Grickat as grammar polysemy, i.e. a polysemy with the grammatical result. In some grammar books identical forms of a preposition and nominative and accusative noun forms are defined as homophoria, and those prepositions and nouns are called homophores. Since homophoria is a type of homonymy, and homonymy excludes semantic relation between lexemes, the term homophoria had to be discarded. It is suggested in this paper that only few nouns in Serbian language can function as prepositions due to fact that only those few have possibility to combine semantically high-productive spaciality with partitivity (rarely possessiveness), as a result of their obligatory usage with partitive (sometimes, possessive) genitive. The usage of nouns as prepositions in Serbian language is slowly going out because their semantics is imprecise, and in certain circumstances difficult to differentiate, which means that the process of transformation of nouns into prepositions was not complete. Thus, more frequent today are compound prepositions formed by a real preposition and a noun (navrh, uvrh, podno). Their semantics is more distinctive and more precise due to real preposition as constituents. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 178021: Opis i standardizacija savremenog srpskog jezika