Polysemy and semantic relations in Italian spatial prepositions

The objective of this paper is to offer an account of the polysemy patterns in Italian spatial prepositions. It is shown that prepositions can be partitioned into three morphological types displaying decreasing polysemy: simple prepositions (e.g. a); complex prepositions (e.g. dietro a); locutional prepositions (e.g. nei pressi di). It is then shown that polysemous and monosemous prepositions can stand in semantic relations, e.g. hyponymy (e.g. sopra a and in cima a). Evidence is offered via a triangulation of corpus data and on-line elicitation tasks with participants, and via the joint use of the definition and coordination tests for polysemy. The theoretical analysis offers an account of the morphological and syntactic structures underpinning each preposition type. Their polysemy and semantic relations are then modelled via the 'semantic maps' method. The main conclusions are as follows: complex and locutional prepositions can denote specific if not unique 'places' with respect to the ground; simple prepositions can denote sets of places possibly shared with locutional prepositions. The paper thus offers a novel systematic account of polysemy in Italian prepositions, and offers evidence that semantic relations (hyponymy, overlap, monosemy) can emerge from these forms of polysemy.