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

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.