Prepositions and natural phenomena: A contrastive study of Serbian, French and Greek

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the usage of the prepositions po, na and u in Serbian, both in the spatial and the more abstract domain of so-called 'natural phenomena'. We show that the difference in their semantics is conceptually based on two basic cognitive oppositions: the contact - containment and the mass-count oppositions. In the contrastive part of our work we compare the Serbian data with their equivalents in French and English.