Grammaticalization of Spatial Particles in English and Slovene

Abstract

The paper from the contrastive point of view discusses the process of grammaticalization of spatial particles in English and Slovene. The analysis is based on the premise that the relationship between a verbal phrase introducing an event and a circumstantial prepositional phrase that positions the event into time and space constitutes the basic grammatical relationship. The process of grammaticalization begins when the syntactic connection between the spatial particle and its attribute in the prepositional syntagm loosens and the particle semantically and syntactically moves closer to the verb in the sense of derivational modification. The final result of this process are verbal derivatives in which the initial spatial particle is reduced to the verbal morpheme and is (partially) devoid of spatial meaning.