THE SPECIFICS OF SOME PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES

Abstract

The paper explores three prepositional phrases selected according to the pattern preposition + noun + preposition. Such a structure is widely used in Bulgarian. The purpose of this paper is to trace the levels of abstraction of the noun in such prepositional constructions, using examples from two corpora – the Bulgarian National Corpus and the Bulgarian National Reference Corpus. Through the examined data, the study aims to demonstrate that the prepositions in the prepositional construction have a grammatical function while the meaning of the prepositional phrase mostly depends on the noun and its semantics. All three prepositional phrases are examined in detail, with each of them falling into a specific abstract domain depending on its usage, context and meaning.