Constructions and the Source-Path-Goal Schema

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He_qnns2210

Rachel Aubrey and I presented some of our ongoing cognitive linguistic work on Ancient Greek prepositional phrases at SBL2023 in San Antonio. We've recorded our paper and published it on YouTube so that more people can benefit from our work.

Greek prepositional phrases are understudied in traditional Greek grammar. And they are often difficult for students to understand, particularly within the grammar/translation model of education. In this video, we examine how cognitive linguistics can provide insight into the meaning of a specific family of prepositional constructions: "A certain man went down from Jerusalem [SOURCE] to Jericho [GOAL]." We discuss relevant grammatical concepts and introduce the construction with a few of its metaphorical extensions, like change-of-state constructions and communication constructions. From there we examine the Source-Path-Goal schema motivates iterative path constructions and range constructions. We conclude with a discussion of some specific case studies that translators and interpreters have historically struggled with and a summary of our grammatical description. 

You can find all our slides for this paper: Constructions and the SPG schema Slides.