A study on the conceptual structure of the use of prepositions in the complement of goal-oriented motion verbs in Brazilian Portuguese

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