Motion, Path, and Aspect: The Case of the German Path Adpositions Über and Durch

Previous research has revealed that polysemy patterns observed in spatial adpositions may correlate systematically with differences in the aspectual perspective that the speaker takes on the spatial event as a whole. Given the close interaction in the sentential context of the spatial adposition, the verb, the case marking, and the functional properties of the trajector and landmark, I claim that the perspectivization of a spatial event depends on the conceptualization of every single internal conceptual entity making up that event as a whole. In this paper, I want to explore the systematic general regularities that underlie and structure the path concepts conventionally associated with German durch ‘through’ and über ‘over’. After a brief presentation of the cognitive construal operations that are at work in German adpositions, I propose three different, yet interrelated Gestalts of path, which are schematic with respect to the path concepts specified by durch and über alike. They are incomplete traversal, complete traversal, and obstacle/boundary traversal. It is shown that these three schematic Gestalts vary substantially with respect to the aspectual properties of the complex motion events to which they belong.