Motivated polysemy manifests an interesting line of inquiry from a cognitive perspective. This paper contributes to it by (1) identifying the senses, (2) analysing their relations and (3) comparing the semantic networks of the English below and the Lithuanian žemiau. 261 concordance lines from fiction in the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language and 1000 from the same register from the British National Corpus were examined. The Principled Polysemy Model (Tyler and Evans 2003) was used to distinguish between senses and their contextual variants. The findings show that the primary sense based on a proto-scene of the Figure beneath the Ground gives rise to the remaining senses of the prepositions. Some of them are concrete, while the others emerge through metaphors enabling abstract usage. The differences between below and žemiau are concerned with the frequency instantiation of concrete vs abstract senses. The paper also considers how the meaning of the Lithuanian preposition interacts with the noun case it governs.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.