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Syntactic Cartography meets semantic maps: charting the polysemy of Italian simple prepositions

  • Francesco-Alessio Ursini ORCID logo and Yue Sara Zhang ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 25, 2025
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The Linguistic Review
From the journal The Linguistic Review

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to account for the polysemy of Italian simple prepositions (a, da, di, in) via the integration of two distinct theoretical perspectives: Semantic Maps and Syntactic Cartography. We show that these prepositions can coexpress several spatial and non-spatial senses, via a detailed study of their distribution in web corpora. We then argue that these senses share a common semantic feature: they all introduce ‘general parthood relations’ between two or more referents in discourse; verbs and complement DPs specify the content of these relations. We propose a cartographic analysis of their structure in which each preposition acts as a single exponent for a cluster of heads and distinct combinations of semantic values. We then offer a semantic maps analysis of these prepositions as coexpressing senses forming a coherent semantic domain, but partitioning this domain via different patterns. We analyse these principles by connecting the maps approach with a compact model-theoretic discussion. We conclude by proposing some considerations on the empirical reach of this integrated method for theories of adpositions and their multi-dimensional polysemy.


Corresponding author: Yue Sara Zhang, Department of English, Hainan University, Haikou, China, E-mail:

  1. Research ethics: Not applicable.

  2. Informed consent: Not applicable.

  3. Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.

  4. Use of Large Language Models, AI and Machine Learning Tools: None Declared.

  5. Conflict of interest: The authors state no conflict of interest.

  6. Research funding: None declared.

  7. Data availability: The raw data can be obtained on request from the corresponding author.

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Received: 2025-05-08
Accepted: 2025-11-12
Published Online: 2025-11-25

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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