THE COGNITIVE-DISCURSIVE OPPOSITIONS OF ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS IN THE TEXT OF AN OFFICIAL DOCUMENT

Abstract

The present paper suggests an account of alternative uses of phrases with the English preposition ‘of’ in official business discourse of the World Heritage Committee: ‘details of / on the project’, ‘a plan of / for the property’, ‘deterioration of / to historic buildings’. The analyzed cases of alternations of prepositions within these phrases display their cognitive-discursive nature. In particular, it is shown that the choice of one preposition over another one within a phrase is motivated, on the one hand, by mental construal of entities and/or phenomena designated by content words and, on the other hand, - by cognitive operations performed by a conceptualizer in bringing the two construals together in building up a phrase. Since the processes of mental construal and cognitive operations are predetermined by concrete contextual and discursive factors, the alternative uses of prepositions are regarded as cognitive-discursive oppositions that manifest the respective aspects of the prepositions' grammatical meaning.

Keywords

• preposition
• content word
• grammatical meaning
• mental construal
• cognitive operation
• discourse
• cognitive-discursive opposition
• предлог
• знаменательное слово
• грамматическое значение
• осмысление денотата
• когнитивная операция
• дискурс
• когнитивно-дискурсивная оппозиция