Linguistics
Azam Alijani; Masood Ghayoomi; Maryam MesgarKhoyi; Houriyeh Ahadi; Yalda Delgoshaei
Volume 16, Issue 1 , August 2024, , Pages 31-53
Abstract
The present study aimed to study the preposition /az/ (i.e., from) in primary school textbooks. Polysemy of prepositions is one of the sources of many students’ perception. A text corpus developed for this study from Farsi, Practical Science, Heavenly Gifts, and Social Studies of elementary school ...
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The present study aimed to study the preposition /az/ (i.e., from) in primary school textbooks. Polysemy of prepositions is one of the sources of many students’ perception. A text corpus developed for this study from Farsi, Practical Science, Heavenly Gifts, and Social Studies of elementary school textbooks grades 1 to 6. To analyze the data, Rosch’s (1975) prototype theory and Tyler and Evans’ (2003) systematic prepositions polysemy approaches in the cognitive semantics framework were used. At first, the sample sentences which contained the preposition /az/ (from) were extracted to form the sub-corpus. The set of senses that are obtained from the sub-corpus are “Type”, “Whole Part”, “Tense, Source”, “Comparation”, “with the help of, By, With”, “About”, “Orientation”, “Motion”, “Metaphor”, and “Complement”. Statistical distribution of meanings in the whole sub-corpus (general domain) was “Whole Part”. The senses of the proposition among lessons and grades (domain restricted) are not similar to the prototype sense. This research showed that the sense “Complement” is the prototype for grades 1 to 3, and the sense “Whole Part” is more frequent in grade 4 to 6. Different forms of this preposition are used at the beginning, middle, and end of sentence. Furthermore, the findings showed that the sense “Metaphor” is the prototype for the book Farsi, the sense “Whole Part” is the prototype sense for Practical Science and Social Studies, and the sense “Tense” is the prototype sense for Heavenly Gifts.