Russian equivalents of the English over

Abstract

Abstract The article deals with a comparative analysis of the English over and the Russian language items that serve as its approximate translation equivalents. The main attention is on such Russian equivalents of over as the prepositional phrases nad with the instrumental case, čerez with the accusative case, za with the accusative case and po with the dative case, as well as the prefixes pere- and pro-. The research is undertaken using the Cognitive linguistic framework or, more precisely, the theory of conceptual metaphor. The aim of the article is to analyse the Russian language means of coding the spatial relations that are similar to those expressed by the English over and to trace patterns of extension of spatial meanings into non-spatial domains in these languages. The study reveals that although English is an analytic language and Russian is a synthetic (fusional) language and, therefore, they use different means to express meanings, similar conceptual-metaphorical motivations of semantic extensions can be traced in both languages.