XXII Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la Facultat de Ciències Humanes i Socials (Any 2017)Traditional strategies and procedures to learn a foreign language
include the study of rules of grammar and doing exercises such as
filling the gaps, repetition of words, drills, memorization of irregular
verbs and sentences which may express usual expressions of
everyday life. Even if the array of exercises is adequate, polysemy in
prepositions causes difficulties in choosing the proper preposition
conveying the meaning required by different contexts.
Two prepositions of the horizontal axis (near and away from) are
taken into consideration in this paper. Approaching the problem
from the theory of polysemy and understanding, the use of these
prepositions is explored along the dimensions of function, topology –
which is the study of physical space–, and force dynamics –
introduced in studies such as Navarro (1998)–, as well as the notion
of frame of reference (Levinson, 2004). Then, the different senses
and uses of these prepositions of the horizontal axis are
systematized, explained and examples are used to illustrate the
difficulties in learning a language and the doubts which students may
have in some situations
