Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context (review)

The papers in this collection are originally from a conference held at the University of Haifa in June 2000, which included presentations by a number of European and Israeli scholars working on various aspects of prepositions. Most of the contributors deal with the problem of the semantic abstractness of prepositional meanings, occasionally focusing on the application of their own theories to this linguistic material. It is perhaps indicative that the core part of the volume opens with a theoretical article by Yves Marie Visetti and Pierre Cadiot that touches upon prepositions only in passing (though the rather original phenomenological approach suggested by these authors is further echoed in subsequent papers on French prepositions written by Pierre Cadiot and Franck Lebas).

A few papers in the collection discuss nonprototypical uses of prepositions. On the grammatical side, Esther Borochovsky-Bar Aba and Hava Reppen discuss prepositions that introduce noun modifiers in Hebrew. On the semantic side, temporal uses of prepositions are the focus of papers by David S. Brée and Ian E. Pratt-Hartmann and by Franck Lebas. In addition, as one might expect from the title of the volume, the role of context in the analysis of prepositions is emphasized, and sometimes it is even argued that certain prepositions have no context-free semantics at all (cf. Dennis Kurzon’s description of the Bislama preposition long). What is understood by context, however, varies from one author to another and includes, for instance, the interaction of the interpretation of a preposition with an aspectual class of the main predicate (Ian E. Pratt-Hartmann and Nissim Francez) or various factors affecting the choice of a preposition that are related to the pragmatic or discourse perspective (cf. Yishai Tobin’s discussion of the distinction between some Hebrew prepositions).

In addition to a number of papers emphasizing theoretical issues, the volume also contains studies that are largely descriptive, including one on Judeo-Greek (Julia G. Krivoruchko), one on Maltese (Rami Saari), and one concerning variations in the declension of Hebrew prepositions (Inbar Kimchi-Angert).

Despite the number of languages mentioned, the volume is not a typological study, since most of the authors concentrate on language-specific problems without any attempt to view them in a broad crosslinguistic perspective. Even when data from different languages are involved, they are discussed in light of language contact (Miriam Ben-Rafael) or contrastive linguistics (Susanne Feigenbaum).

This volume certainly may be of interest both to scholars working on general issues of prepositions, who can appreciate the curious theories proposed, and to those working on specific problems, who will appreciate the large amount of empirical material.