Investigating and Analyzing the Locative Preposition "Below" With a Cognitive Linguistics Approach

Prepositions, as a group of frequent and important grammatical words, play an important role in many languages, including Persian. The aim of the present study is to examine the polysemy of the preposition “bellow” within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics approach and based on two theories of Principled Polysemy (Tyler and Evans, 2001, 2003) and Image Schemas (Johnson, 1987). The research data includes a set of Persian sentences and phrases containing the preposition “bellow” that were extracted from the Hamshahri corpus (second edition). In addition to this corpus, two dictionaries, Dehkhoda and Moein, were also used. The results of the research show that the preposition "bellow" in its primary and prototype meaning expresses a situation in which an object (trajector) is located in a lower position than another object (landmark) in terms of spatial position in the vertical direction, between which there may or may not be a distance and one may or may not cover the other. In addition, "bellow" also has three meanings: "less", "dominance and control", and "influenceability", which are the result of a metaphorical expansion of the prototype meaning.