A Study on the Conceptual Structure of the Use of Prepositions in the Complement of Goal-oriented Motion Verbs in Brazilian Portuguese

This study aims at understanding the conceptual structure of the use of prepositions (a `at', para `to', em `in') in the complement of goal-oriented motion verbs (ir `go', vir `come', chegar `arrive') in Brazilian Portuguese. Applying a corpus-based and profilebased methodology, within a Cognitive Grammar framework, this study combines a multifactorial usage-feature analysis of these prepositional constructions with their subsequent multivariate statistical modeling. The results point out the cognitive basis of this constructional variation and specifically show that the semantic features `profiling' and `motion verb' are the most important language-internal predictors in the use of the prepositions. This variation conveys alternative grammatical construals, i.e., the very high frequency of em `in' in the complement of goal-oriented motion indicates nuances of meaning motivated by the superimposition of image schemas and the cognitive operation of profiling. Language-external features, such as register, also play a role in the variation.