CONSTRUCTIONS WITH THE PREPOSITION PO IN THE NOVELS THE WOMAN FROM SARAJEVO (GOSPOĐICA) AND THE DAMNED YARD (PROKLETA AVLIJA) BY IVO ANDRIĆ

This paper presents the analysis results of syntactic and semantic features of constructions with the preposition po in The Woman from Sarajevo (Gospođica, 1945) and The Damned Yard (Prokleta avlija, 1954) by Ivo Andrić. The main goal of the research was to determine the meanings and functions of these constructions in the novels that form the corpus of the research, but also to try to expand and supplement, on the basis of selected examples, the previous syntactic and semantic analyses of the preposition po in our older and also more recent grammars and linguistic articles. By using both the theoretical framework of cognitive semantics and the theoretical foundations of more traditional approaches to the meaning of prepositions, 298 constructions (213 from The Woman from Sarajevo and 85 from The Damned Yard) were analysed, and it was concluded that the language of Andrić’s works, at least when it comes to constructions with the preposition po, is not different from the contemporary Serbian language. Namely, it was observed that there are more locative than accusative constructions with the preposition po, and that the most frequent are the spatial locative and the base/criterion locative. At the end of the paper, we pointed out the non-prepositional function of the word po.