From within and beyond: a Cognitive Grammar analysis of prepositional complements of prepositions

Abstract The conceptual characterization of word classes has been a central topic in cognitive linguistics since its inception. However, compared to major classes such as nouns and verbs, minor word classes have received less attention. This study discusses the conceptual basis of prepositional phrases, especially focusing on prepositional complements of prepositions (hereafter, PCOPs) – a syntactically irregular but widely-used structure in English (e.g., from within the company , from behind the table , since before the war ). The aims of this paper are threefold: (1) to demonstrate the relative prevalence of PCOPs in English through an extensive study of the British National Corpus; (2) to identify two distinct functions of PCOPs – the Emphasis Type and the Search-domain Type; and (3) to characterize the conceptual basis of PCOPs, highlighting the conceptual similarities between PCOPs and (countable) noun phrases, and thus to explain the occurrence of PCOPs in slots where we normally find noun phrases. We also show how the analysis could be extended to another type of nominal prepositional phrases, i.e., prepositional subjects. By explaining the distribution of PCOPs (and prepositional subjects) in this manner, we underscore the necessity of a conceptual characterization of word classes in linguistic research.