Functional effects, prepositional semantics, and metaphorical containment in Brazilian Portuguese: the case of em, dentro de, and fora de

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira, Aparecida de Araújo
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Scripta
• Texto Completo: http://periodicos.pucminas.br/index.php/scripta/article/view/P.2358-3428.2016v20n40p61
• topic: Metaphor; Experiential correlation; Containment functional relation; Prepositional meaning; Brazilian Portuguese.

I analyzed conventional metaphorical expressions in Brazilian Portuguese having lexicalized functional effects of spatial scenes as complements of the prepositions dentro de [inside], em [in, on, at], and fora de [out of]. The functional effects investigated were ‘protection’, ‘covering/hiding’, ‘control’, and ‘envelopment’, which constitute the family resemblance concept of Containment. I provided a cognitive account of these conventional expressions in terms of primary metaphors such as invisible is inside and uncontrolled is outside, emerging through experiential correlation in primary scenes. I described twelve meanings based on the container image schema, four based on the verticality schema, and four based on the nonimagetic notion of ‘non-existence’. Contradicting my initial expectations, the corpus-based analysis revealed little overlapping between em and sob [under], and fora de and sem [without]. However, the study confirmed the asymmetry between the prepositions meaning ‘in’ and those meaning ‘out’.