11 Taking the Principled Polysemy Model of spatial particles beyond English: the case of Russian za
Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
Darya Shakova
Georgetown University
Description
The purpose of the present work is to begin to test the universality of the Principled Polysemy model by applying the model to the Russian spatial particle, za. 1 Za is a particularly good test of the model because it is highly polysemous. In addition, the analysis of za entails considering how the Principled Polysemy model applies to a language whose system of spatial referencing includes a complex system of case marking, which is lacking in English. In this area of the analysis, the authors have been greatly influenced by Janda’s (1993, 2000) work on Russian case.