Spanish prepositions a, de, en, por, para and their equivalents in the Craotian language

Knoll, Aleksandra. (2018). Spanish prepositions a, de, en, por, para and their equivalents in the Craotian language. PhD Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Linguistics.
(Poslijediplomski doktorski studij lingvistike) [mentor Pranjković, Ivo and Budor, Karlo].

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Abstract

Since Spanish and Croatian belong to different language groups their entire language structures are different. Spanish is an analytic language, so it does not use cases and morphological case endings to determine the noun’s function in a sentence. Croatian, on the other hand, is synthetic, with seven cases and morphological case endings. Precisely because of this difference, prepositions in these two languages have a different scope of use. The aim of this doctoral thesis is: I.) to list as many meanings (lexical and functional) of the five most frequently used Spanish prepositions (a, de, en, por, para), and II.) to explore in which way are those meanings expressed in the Croatian language. The thesis is divided into two parts: theoretical background and the corpus analysis. The first part, which is dedicated to the theoretical notions related to prepositions, is divided into three major chapters. In the chapter dedicated to prepositions in general there is a description of prepositions based on the morphological, semantic and syntactic criteria, followed by the analysis of some of the definitions of prepositions, and finally an explanation of their function in language and their meanings (dimensional and non-dimensional). The chapter dedicated to the Spanish prepositions starts with a short outline of the history of the Spanish language which contributes to the better understanding of the role the prepositions play in the Spanish language. That chapter includes a description of similarities between prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions, an explanation of the connection between the case system and prepositions, and a brief review of prepositions that no longer function as prepositions and other words which sometimes function as prepositions. That is followed by the classification of types of Spanish prepositions and the inventory of Spanish prepositions, as well as the explanations of which words can function as the governing words and which can function as the governed words. Finally, there is a brief overview of some of the attempts to systematize the Spanish prepositions. The chapter dedicated to the Spanish prepositions ends with a description of the peculiarities of the Spanish prepositions (contraction with the word which follows them, grouped prepositions and the so called zero preposition) and the short review of the study of the Spanish prepositions during the 20 century and after. The chapter dedicated to the Croatian case system and the Croatian prepositions starts with a short description of the case system, which is followed by the description of the prepositions in the Croatian language: classification of the Croatian prepositions based on different criteria and the cases with which the preposition are used. The chapter ends with listing the words which can precede and the words which can follow the Croatian prepositions, and a short overview of the study of prepositions in the Croatian language. The second part of the thesis is dedicated to the corpus analysis. Different meanings of each of the Spanish prepositions in question are described by dividing them into dimensional and nondimensional meanings. The description of the prepositional meanings includes the information on which words precede and which words follow a certain preposition in a certain context, because without that information the description would not be complete. The prepositions which can substitute a certain preposition in a certain context are also listed. Each of the meanings of the Spanish prepositions is supported by examples accompanied by their translation into Croatian, which illustrate how a certain meaning of a Spanish preposition is expressed in the Croatian language. The description of the meanings of the Spanish prepositions is taken from Preposiciones: Valores generales by Luque Durán. Since one of the goals of this thesis is to list as many meanings of the aforementioned Spanish prepositions the author of the thesis decided to use Luque Durán’s description because he himself stated (1973:8) that he reduced the complex range of prepositional uses, at the same time describing each preposition with enough detail which enable drawing logical conclusions regarding the uses which are not described. The corpus which is analyzed is made up of examples which illustrate the prepositional meanings described by Luque Durán (and translated into Croatian by the author of the thesis) and sentences or parts of sentences from the following literary works and their translations into Croatian: − Gabriel García Márquez: Del amor y otros demonios / O ljubavi i drugim nečistim silama − Gabriel García Márquez: Crónica de una muerte anunciada / Kronika najavljene smrti − Gabriel García Márquez: El amor en los tiempos del cólera / Ljubav u doba kolere − Gabriel García Márquez: La mala hora / Zla kob − Jorge Luis Borges: El Aleph / Aleph − Jorge Luis Borges: Ficciones / Izmišljaji − Jorge Luis Borges: Historia universal de la infamia / Opća povijest gadosti. The corpus analysis is followed by a part dedicated to the most frequent oppositions between the five Spanish prepositions in question. It does not form part of the corpus analysis and because of that it is not accompanied by the examples from the corpus, but it serves as an addition to the corpus analysis. It is added because emphasizing the oppositions between the prepositions in question additionally sheds light to their meaning and their use in the Spanish language. The Spanish examples are translated into Croatian as to clarify how these oppositions are expressed in the Croatian language. The thesis ends with the conclusions drawn from the analysis which show how certain prepositional meanings in the Spanish language are expressed in the Croatian language. Rarely is one Spanish construction expressed by one Croatian construction. Most often one Spanish construction is expressed by different Croatians constructions (sometimes as many as eight different ones).

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