Consider the Preposition

This subject first arose in an on-line email list discussion about art and aesthetics, specifically on the point of how concepts are predicated. Another person argued that the common practice in English of saying "X is Y" ran afoul of many difficulties (instantiation, reification, etc.). 

These conversations led me to ponder how we develop our sense of predicating qualities on some named subject, and that led me further to think of how we use English idiomatically, almost without noticing it, to create shades of distinction in our expressions. Ultimately, I began to think about prepositions and their near relatives, the adverbs that are used with verbs ("run down a fact," "speed up the process," etc.) which has long lost its literal meaning (down, up) and now conveys only a conventionalized meaning.

Language historians tell us that our modern prepositions evolved from these adverbs used in this way. [Paul Roberts, Understanding Grammar, New York: Harper & Row, 1954, pp. 227-228.]

But there is still the matter of how we come to know what "up" and "down," "over" and "under" and the other prepositions (adverbs) signify. As a small child learning the language, our mother or father might have put a toy ___ the table and said, "The toy is on the table." Next, they might have moved it ___ the table and said, "The toy is under the table." And this would have gone on and on until we grasped the relationship they were demonstrating. 

How did we get from "on the table"—a position—to "this goes on and on"?

On this blog, I want to consider the preposition, and to consider how we think about representations, on one hand verbal and internal, and on the other, external and often visual.

I will come back to this specific topic in a separate, longer blog. I will also include here essays and musings about visual art, language, and other matters that arise from culture and society.