Ebook: Relations between verbs and simple prepositions in Earlier Egyptian

2012. - 10 p.
Egyptian prepositions display a bewildering range of meanings, including at first sightcontradictory ones. The prepositionm, for example, can be translated by both the English prepositions in and from. The aim of the present paper is to show that, besides a necessarylexical approach, it is possible to identify semantic regularities at the level of Egyptian verb and preposition combinations
1. Prior to investigating these verb and preposition combinations, I will briefly survey whatcriteria allow for defining a word-class preposition in Earlier Egyptian and identify an inner layer of Earlier Egyptian simple prepositions which are of particular interest for semanticanalysis. In order later to apprehend the semantic interplay in verb and preposition combinations,I will then propose a natural way of allowing one first to observe the semantic behaviour of prepositions when standing outside any semantic interaction with a verb. I will also define howthe concepts of valential and non-valential prepositional phrases are used here. Some results of this research will then be presented by means of a short series of examples.