Many ways of moving along a path: What distinguishes prepositional and postpositional uses of Finnish path adpositions?

Abstract Finnish path adpositions meaning ⿿through⿿, ⿿along⿿, ⿿across⿿, ⿿past⿿, ⿿over⿿ and ⿿via⿿, can be used both prepositionally and postpositionally and are thus representative of the typologically rare class of bipositions. In the literature, the alternation has been taken to reflect differences in style rather than meaning. The current study shows, however, that there are semantic differences between the variants that are related to different kinds of motion along the path: factive vs. fictive motion. The term fictive motion refers to the use of directional and dynamic elements to designate situations that are static in the extralinguistic reality (e.g. The highway goes from Paris to Berlin). I distinguish three types of paths: (1) paths of locomotion (actual motion), (2) paths of location (canonical fictive motion expressed by a motion verb), (3) frame-setting paths, which consist of two subtypes: (a) paths of occurrence (presence of a multiplicity of entities along the path: There is snow all across the country) and (b) paths of process (a process taking place all along the path: It rains across Europe). I argue that the postpositional use of Finnish bipositions is the unmarked way to indicate paths of locomotion and location, whereas their prepositional use is the unmarked way of indicating frame-setting paths. This is because bipositions used as postpositions are more closely associated with the force-dynamic meaning of the verb, which they elaborate, while those used prepositionally set up an independent, setting-like path. This semantic independence typical of the bipositions used as prepositions is probably also the main reason for their predominance in the expression of time: temporal adverbials are in general more independent of the verb than spatial ones.