Delimiting Adverbial Meanings. A corpus-based comparative study on Czech spatial prepositions and their English equivalents

Abstract

The data of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank (a member of the family of Prague Dependency Treebanks) have served as a basis for the comparative study of delimiting adverbial meanings of the local relation "within the given place". The Czech prepositional groups containing the prepositions v, na, and u with the above meaning are compared with their English equivalents, using a more subtle differentiation into three semantic subgroups of "inside", "on the surface" and "at the given place". Our analysis confirms that though every language structures the reality in a different way, certain tendencies may be observed in the relation of the forms and their functions that eventually result in a more detailed classification. The contribution presents results of an ongoing work.