Özet:

The present paper suggests an account of alternative uses of phrases with the English preposition ‘of’ in official business discourse of the World Heritage Committee: ‘details of / on the project’, ‘a plan of / for the property’, ‘deterioration of / to historic buildings’. The analyzed cases of alternations of prepositions within these phrases display their cognitive-discursive nature. In particular, it is shown that the choice of one preposition over another one within a phrase is motivated, on the one hand, by mental construal of entities and/or phenomena designated by content words and, on the other hand, - by cognitive operations performed by a conceptualizer in bringing the two construals together in building up a phrase. Since the processes of mental construal and cognitive operations are predetermined by concrete contextual and discursive factors, the alternative uses of prepositions are regarded as cognitive-discursive oppositions that manifest the respective aspects of the prepositions' grammatical meaning.

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