Image schemas and prepositions in the Pauline Corpus

Abstract

Prepositions in the Greek New Testament can convey multiple abstract meanings usually based on a single concrete meaning; at the same time, multiple prepositions with different concrete meanings can convey the same abstract meaning. The difficulty of explaining the abstract meanings in terms of the concrete can be mitigated through cognitive linguistics which approaches language in a manner that emphasizes the importance of meaning and ties it to human cognition, experience, and perspective. It defines the concretely based abstract meanings of prepositions as metaphors, and provides explanatory constructs to navigate the path from concrete meaning to abstract meaning which include: (1) image schemas, a catalogue of human interactions with the physical world (e.g., Path, Containment, Location), and (2) conceptual metaphors which form a large body of sometimes interrelated expressions that articulate abstract concepts in terms of the physical (e.g., “Purposes are destinations” and “Life is a journey”). Having these tools allows us to speak of abstract prepositions as metaphoric prepositions. We combine our cognitive approach with the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) which provides a systematic means of capturing a linguistic metaphor, which it defines as the contrast between contextual meaning (abstract) and basic meaning (concrete). We also conduct our inquiry within a corpus linguistic context to ensure a reliable sample of data for our conclusions. The focus of our inquiry is the Pauline corpus, which consists of thirteen of the letters in the New Testament. This corpus consists of nearly 30,000 words in Greek and 40,000 in English, a reliable size for a specialized corpus. Our inquiry addresses all prepositions found therein. Our intent is to characterize the confounding mystery of the prepositions in terms of image schemas with the help of conceptual metaphors to explain the connection between contextual and basic meani