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

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