This Master’s thesis analyses and juxtaposes the English prepositions on and at with German an and auf from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. In accordance with the core tenets of embodied cognition, the thesis challenges the traditionally rigid boundaries of the category of prepositions, their status between lexical and function items, as well as the complex network of their various senses and uses. The polysemy of the chosen prepositions is explored on the basis of metaphorical extension from the spatial to more abstract domains. Through a corpus study of their most frequent complements, the prepositions are compared to determine whether any image schemas, metaphors or syntactic structures are shared in both languages, and contrasted to highlight the differences in their linguistic realisations. The thesis thus contributes to the discourse of cognitive linguistics and the language-specificity of prepositions, by illustrating that even two languages from the same language family greatly differ in their manifestations.
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