YouVersion verses-of-the-year in relation to Afrikaans prepositional met and van constructions expressing fear and loneliness

Abstract

How do the 2022 YouVersion Bible verses-of-theyear reflect the way in which fear and loneliness were communicated via prepositional phrases that year? The associated objectives of this article are to compare Afrikaans met and van prepositional constructions expressing fear and loneliness in 2022 in two print books with the top 2022 YouVersion Bible verses; to establish how met and van relate to other prepositions in this regard, and to determine how these related prepositional constructions can expand a trauma-informed gradient of uses. This article considers Afrikaans met (with) and van (of) prepositional constructions expressing fear and loneliness in a subset of a corpus of such constructions produced in 2022. The Cognitive Linguistics analysis of the prepositional constructions centres on them as asymmetrical constructions on a spatiotemporal continuum of use in relation to the human body.