This book explores the context around why English prepositions are used in figurative language more frequently than nouns and verbs, using corpus-based evidence to examine the most often used prepositions and how they are employed and for what purpose.

While research on cognitive approaches to metaphor has significantly expanded in recent decades, little attention has been paid to prepositions as vehicles of figurative language, owing to their polysemous, complex, and inconsistent nature. To bridge this gap, Ounis introduces an innovative conceptual framework that integrates conceptual metaphor theory, diachronic linguistics, and discourse pragmatics. Drawing upon an extensive corpus of American presidential inaugural addresses, this book considers the linguistic, conceptual, pragmatic, and contextual dimensions of English prepositions, revealing the fascinating interplay between language, culture, and cognition.

This volume will be of interest to scholars in pragmatics, metaphor studies, English language, rhetoric studies, and historical linguistics.