Räumliche Präpositionen in DaF-Lehrwerken: Kognitionslinguistische Einblicke

This article aims to show how insights from cognitive linguistics are used to teach prepositions in order to make the complexity and variation of spatial language more transparent for learners. For this purpose, an overview of previous research results on the motivation for the complexity of meanings of the prepositions in, über, auf and hinter is given. The analysis carried out here focuses on two series of textbooks in the context of German-as-a-foreign-language-teaching in Finland. The results show that although the selected textbooks use the general principles of physical and conceptual experience as a basis for language teaching, this line is only superficially enforced and primarily intended to teach prototypical prepositional meanings.