The preposition and prefix nad in South Slavic languages with emphasis on Macedonian

Abstract: This paper examines the senses of the preposition and prefix nad in Macedonian and the rela-tion to its equivalents in other South Slavic languages: Croatian, Serbian, and Bulgarian. The main goal of the paper is to establish the network of spatial and non-spatial senses of the preposition nad and explain how each sense is linked to the meanings of the prefix nad-. By discovering the semantic components distinguishing one sense from another, the authors pro-pose a conceptual network of senses based on the analysis of Macedonian nad, a preposition that subsumes the senses of Croatian and Serbian iznad and nad. The analysis is based on the classification of corpus examples collected from various texts that reflect contemporary lan-guage usage. Traditional treatments of the preposition nad fail to provide a unitary account for all its in-stances and to explain the relation to the prefix nad-. In cognitive-based studies, Slavic prepo-sitions and prefixes are treated within the same conceptual network, and so the semantic deri-vation of prefixes does not seem to be explained in a systematic way. We apply an alternative approach by positing the same cognitive network, but at two different levels of abstraction. The network of the prefix nad- shows that each meaning of a prefix represents an extension from a particular corresponding spatial or non-spatial sense of the preposition nad. The pro-posed network could be applied to the isofunctional prepositions in the languages considered because it determines common derivational pathways of the prefix nad- in the South Slavic languages.