Albanian World-View: Co-Locativity as the Schematic Meaning of Albanian Verbal Prefix Bashke-

Abstract

The traditional approach to verb prefixes is to consider them as bound morphemes without a real emphasis and analysis of their cognitive meaning. In this paper we use the concept schematic meaning which gathers verbs with different meaning while they share the same prefix. In our case, the Albanian bashke-prefix was chosen and its allomorph bashka-. In order to appreciate the schematic meaning concept and its application in the Albanian case, we considered the schematic meaning as the super-schema of bashke-prefix (co-prefix). This super-schema characterizes the metaphorical reading of the same prefix with different meaning which plays an important role in the semantics of abstract notions. This cognitive model helps to build a rather clear image of how the trajector and landmark inter-act as the basic units of spatial relations; the schematic brings about diverse meaning in a strict spatial frame-work.