ON FUNCTIONAL PECULIARITIES OF LOCATIVE PREPOSITIONS AS MEANS OF SPATIAL RELATIONSHIPS EXPRESSION IN THE GERMAN LANGAUGE

The article presents locative prepositions as tools of space conceptualization and verbalization in the German language. The author states that there is some close interlink between two concepts - Man and space, and it plays an initial role in the organization of human knowledge. On offering the statement presented above, the author considers specificity of situational perception of spatial relationships that are conceptualized in a particular language. The suggested correlations of spatial relationships: location in space, transporting in space as a result of the movement and the movement itself included, helps the author to prove that spatial relationships may be differentiated as dynamic or static. It is confirmed that the main factors that influence the choice of the locative prepositions, viewed as the markers of spatial relationships, may include the measurability of the object relations, its functional qualities, and principles of visual perception that guard the specificity of person's orientation in space. It is proved that the native German speakers prefer using the preposition in to verbalize the situations of internal space and choose the preposition an to verbalize the situations of external space. The author concludes that the choice of the locative preposition for denoting space depends on the speaker's intentions and the ontological focus in which the speaker wishes to describe spatial relations.