The Minutes Genre and the Prepositions: Reflections Upon the Teaching of Spanish to Secretariat

This essay reflects upon the behavior of prepositions "of, in, to", in the "minutes genre", written in Spanish, trying to place them according to the basic directions (origin, aim, and content) and spatial axes (horizontal and container/content) proposed by Castilho (2004). It is a bibliographical and documental research, whose objective is to verify if this supposed principle can be applied to the Spanish language and to check if the meanings of prepositions, revealed in the minute's genre, correspond to those described by grammar currently used in teaching Spanish in a Secretarial course. For this purpose, we used the theoretical support for the study of prepositions in Spanish assumptions of Llorach Alarcos (1999), Martin Cid (2002), Vigon Artos (2007) and Araus (1987) and the functionalist assumptions of Castilho (2004), Neves (2000, 2001, 2007), and Cunha (2008). We selected the "minutes genre" as an object of study for considering such genre as an authentic instrument and a reference for Spanish to Secretarial course. The results demonstrate that the spatial axes proposed by Castillo (2004) may be applicable in Spanish and that the grammar used only partially includes prepositional values expressed by minutes genre.