Polysemy as the Basis of Syncretism of Prepositions

Abstract

. At the present stage of the development of philological science, many topical problems of the theory of prepositions, such as polysemy, semantics and syncretism of these linguistic units, remain unresolved to the end. Thus, there is still no description of the semantics of prepositions, either in Russian or in French, which would cover all the units of this class of words. The explanations in dictionary articles of the polysemy of prepositions seem somewhat simplified, and there is a difference in the number of meanings attributed to one preposition or another in different dictionaries. This prevents prepositions from being adequately understood, used and translated from one language to another, and causes difficulties in learning a foreign language. In spite of numerous publications on syncretism there is practically no comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of syncretism of prepositional units in different languages: Russian and French, and the theory of syncretism of multi-valued prepositions in these languages is underdeveloped. The aim of this article is to present polysemy of prepositions in Russian and French as a ground for the syncretism of prepositional-propositional meanings. We will consider the examples of prepositional syncretism in Russian and French fiction of the 19-21th centuries. In the course of the research we used descriptive method, methods of component and distributive analysis. The result of the research is the discovery and consideration of some types of syncretic meanings of prepositions: a) spatio-temporal meanings, b) spatio-objective meanings, c) cause-objective meanings, as well as the conditions of this phenomenon origin. It is concluded that ambiguity, which is an intrinsic semantic property of prepositions, is the basis for the syncretism emergence. The syncretic unity can be formed by components (semes) of the same or different levels which make up the structure of prepositional meaning. The results of the study contribute to the development of the theory of polysemy and syncreticism, the theory of prepositions and intensification of the study of prepositional semantics.