Prepositions and verbal prefixes in Russian: From case to aspect (and back)

The polysemy of prepositions has been a long-standing issue in Russian and, more broadly, Slavic linguistics, whereas the set of the relations encoded by one single preposition may appear as no more than an idiosyncratic collection of different meanings, especially when more than one (direct or oblique) case is governed by the same P. In the contribution presented in the poster session of FASL 33 (May 17, 2024), it is proposed that the oblique case system of Russian can be formalized along the lines of Manzini & Savoia (2011) Manzini & Franco (2017a; 2017b), where the category of oblique is reduced to the way natural languages map the ‘zonal inclusion’ relation (part-whole/possession: Belvin 1996; Belvin & den Dikken 1997) onto the functional lexicon, assuming that both prepositions and sublexical units that correspond to (oblique) case inflections are part of the Lexicon. In a case-inflecting language like Russian, which also has prepositions, the latter can be conceived as modifiers of the Case inflectional morpheme, and the preposition 's' is analyzed as a study case, arguing that the apparently conflicting meanings it encodes (‘off’/’from’/’since’ vs ‘with’ vs ‘about’/’approximately’ , ex. (3)) can be straightforwardly derived from the compositional semantics of the 'superset-of'/'subset-of' content of the case inflection with that of P. It is also argued that prepositions and verbal prefixes (whose inventory in Russian and other Slavic languages largely overlap) can be unified and there is no reason to mantain a categorial distinction. To this purpose, it is also proposed that the semantics of P correspond to a pure property (semantic type t) and that the mode of composition it gives rise to is the operation Restrict as formalized by Chung & Ladusaw (2004).