Greek prepositions: patterns of polysemization and semantic bleaching.

The paper describes some pathways through which the meaning of prepositions became increasingly wide and less specific. Semantic extension and bleaching are the reasons which brought about replacement of proper prepositions by newly created adverbial ones, especially in cases where a specific spatial meaning needed to be expressed. The renewal of prepositions shows that, as a word class, they constitute a nice example of the development and effects of grammaticalization processes.