Space, Time, and the Use of Language

Space, Time, and the Use of Language PDF Author: Thora Tenbrink
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110198827
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Does temporal language depend on spatial language? This widespread view is intuitively appealing since spatial and temporal expressions are often similar or identical. Also, metaphors consistently express temporal phenomena in terms of spatial language, pointing to a close semantic and conceptual relationship. But what about the application of the two kinds of linguistic expressions in natural discourse? The book draws together findings on terms that describe the relation of objects or events to each other (such as in front / behind, before / after, etc.), highlighting the relationship between cognition and language usage. Using the method of cognitively motivated discourse analysis, novel empirical results are presented to complement earlier findings. The detailed investigation of a selected range of terms that appear to be parallel in space and time highlights both similarities and fundamental differences in their application. As a result, a new picture emerges: The concepts of space and time are represented in language usage in various systematic ways, reflecting how we understand the world - and at the same time reflecting how our concepts of space and time differ fundamentally. The volume contributes to a debate that has been of interest for cognitive linguists for several decades, concerning the understanding of transfer processes between two conceptually intertwined domains. The specific contribution of this work consists of addressing the novel question of how such processes come into play in the actual application of relevant expressions in natural discourse. By adopting established approaches from Discourse Analysis for issues that are deeply rooted in interdisciplinary research in Cognitive Science, insights are drawn together from two hitherto largely unrelated fields of research to approach the topic from an original perspective, leading to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the domains of space and time and their expression in language.

Space, Time, and the Use of Language

Space, Time, and the Use of Language PDF Author: Thora Tenbrink
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110198827
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Does temporal language depend on spatial language? This widespread view is intuitively appealing since spatial and temporal expressions are often similar or identical. Also, metaphors consistently express temporal phenomena in terms of spatial language, pointing to a close semantic and conceptual relationship. But what about the application of the two kinds of linguistic expressions in natural discourse? The book draws together findings on terms that describe the relation of objects or events to each other (such as in front / behind, before / after, etc.), highlighting the relationship between cognition and language usage. Using the method of cognitively motivated discourse analysis, novel empirical results are presented to complement earlier findings. The detailed investigation of a selected range of terms that appear to be parallel in space and time highlights both similarities and fundamental differences in their application. As a result, a new picture emerges: The concepts of space and time are represented in language usage in various systematic ways, reflecting how we understand the world - and at the same time reflecting how our concepts of space and time differ fundamentally. The volume contributes to a debate that has been of interest for cognitive linguists for several decades, concerning the understanding of transfer processes between two conceptually intertwined domains. The specific contribution of this work consists of addressing the novel question of how such processes come into play in the actual application of relevant expressions in natural discourse. By adopting established approaches from Discourse Analysis for issues that are deeply rooted in interdisciplinary research in Cognitive Science, insights are drawn together from two hitherto largely unrelated fields of research to approach the topic from an original perspective, leading to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the domains of space and time and their expression in language.

Space, Time and Language in Plutarch

Space, Time and Language in Plutarch PDF Author: Aristoula Georgiadou
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110539470
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : de
Pages : 396

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Book Description
'Space and time' have been key concepts of investigation in the humanities in recent years. In the field of Classics in particular, they have led to the fresh appraisal of genres such as epic, historiography, the novel and biography, by enabling a close focus on how ancient texts invest their representations of space and time with a variety of symbolic and cultural meanings. This collection of essays by a team of international scholars seeks to make a contribution to this rich interdisciplinary field, by exploring how space and time are perceived, linguistically codified and portrayed in the biographical and philosophical work of Plutarch of Chaeronea (1st-2nd centuries CE). The volume’s aim is to show how philological approaches, in conjunction with socio-cultural readings, can shed light on Plutarch’s spatial terminology and clarify his conceptions of time, especially in terms of the ways in which he situates himself in his era’s fascination with the past. The volume’s intended readership includes Classicists, intellectual and cultural historians and scholars whose field of expertise embraces theoretical study of space and time, along with the linguistic strategies used to portray them in literary or historical texts.

Languages in Space and Time: Models and Methods from Complex Systems Theory

Languages in Space and Time: Models and Methods from Complex Systems Theory PDF Author: Marco Patriarca
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108480659
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Demonstrates how complexity theory and statistical mechanics help define the language groups and model the language dynamics.

Space and Time in Language and Literature

Space and Time in Language and Literature PDF Author: Lovorka Gruić Grmuša
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443815098
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Space and time, their infiniteness and/or their limit(ation)s, their coding, conceptualization and the relationship between the two, have been intriguing people for millennia. Linguistics and literature are no exceptions in this sense. This book brings together eight essays which all deal with the expression of space and/or time in language and/or literature. The book explores the issues of space, time and their interrelation from two different perspectives: the linguistic and the literary. The first section—Time and Space in Language—contains four papers which focus on linguistics, i.e. explore issues relative to the expression of time and space in natural languages. The topics under consideration include: typology regarding the expression of spatial information in languages around the world (Ch.1), space as expressed and conceptualized in neutral, postural and verbs of fictive motion (Ch. 2), prepositional semantics (Ch.3), aspectuality (in Tamil, Ch. 4). All articles propose innovative topics and/or approaches, crossreferring when possible between space and time. Given that all seem to propose at least some elements of “language universality” vs. “language variability”, the strong cognitivist nature of the approach (even when the paper is not written within a cognitive linguistic framework) represents a particularly strong feature of the section, with a strong appeal to experts from fields that need not necessarily be linguistic. The second section of this volume—Space and Time in Literature—brings together four essays dealing with literary topics. Inherent in each narrative are both temporal and spatial implications because a literary text testifies of a certain time, it is from and about a certain period, as well as about a certain space, even if virtual. A particularly strong feature of these papers is that they envision space and time as complementary parameters of experience and not as conceptual opposites, following the transfer of perspective through the whole century. Departing from the late nineteenth century England’s and Croatia’s fictive spaces (Ch. 5), the topic moves via the American Southern Gothic, focusing on Faulkner from the thirties to the early sixties (Ch. 6), via the post-WWII perspectives on history, probing the postmodern context of temporality (Ch 7), to finally reach the contemporary era of post 9/11 space-time (Ch 8). The voyage from chapter five to eight is thus a journey through space and time that allows for some answers to the nature of reality (of a variety of space-times) as conceived by both the authors of these essays as well as by the authors that these essays discuss. The main goal of the editors has been to bring together different scientific traditions which can contribute complementary concerns and methodologies to the issues under exam; from the literary and descriptive via the diachronic and typological explorations all the way to cognitive (linguistic) analyses, bordering psycholinguistics and neuroscience. One of the strengths of this volume thus lies in the diversity of perspectives articulated within it, where the agreements, but also the controversies and divergences demonstrate constant changes in society which, in turn, shapes our views of space-time/reality. All this also suggests that science and literature are not above or apart from their culture, but embedded within it, and that there exists a strong relativistic interrelation between (spatio-temporal) reality and culture. The only hope to objectively envisage any if not all of the above, is by learning how to move (our thought) through space, time or, to put it in simpler terms, how to shift perspectives.

Language in Time and Space

Language in Time and Space PDF Author: Brigitte L.M. Bauer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110897725
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
The honoree of this Festschrift has for many years now marked modern trends in diachronic and synchronic linguistics by his own publications and by stimulating those of numerous others. This collection of articles presents data-oriented studies that integrate modern and traditional approaches in the field, thus reflecting the honoree's contribution to contemporary linguistics. The articles relate to comparative data from (early) Indo-European languages and a variety of other languages and discuss the theoretical implications of phenomena such as linguistic universals, reconstruction, and language classification.

Space and Time in Languages and Cultures

Space and Time in Languages and Cultures PDF Author: Luna Filipovi?
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027223912
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This is an interdisciplinary volume that focuses on the central topic of the representation of events, namely cross-cultural differences in representing time and space, as well as various aspects of the conceptualisation of space and time. It brings together research on space and time from a variety of angles, both theoretical and methodological. Crossing boundaries between and among disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy, or anthropology forms a creative platform in a bold attempt to reveal the complex interaction of language, culture, and cognition in the context of human communication and interaction. The authors address the nature of spatial and temporal constructs from a number of perspectives, such as cultural specificity in determining time intervals in an Amazonian culture, distinct temporalities in a specific Mongolian hunter community, Russian-specific conceptualisation of temporal relations, Seri and Yucatec frames of spatial reference, memory of events in space and time, and metaphorical meaning stemming from perception and spatial artefacts, to name but a few themes. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different albeit related point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Linguistic Diversity (HCP 36) which focuses on the language-specific vis-à-vis universal aspects of linguistic representation of spatial and temporal reference.

Space and Time in Languages and Cultures

Space and Time in Languages and Cultures PDF Author: Luna Filipovi?
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027223904
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 509

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Book Description
This volume offers novel insights into linguistic diversity in the domains of spatial and temporal reference, searching for uniformity amongst diversity. A number of authors discuss expression of dynamic spatial relations cross-linguistically in a vast range of typologically different languages such as Bezhta, French, Hinuq, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbian, and Spanish, among others. The contributions on linguistic expression of time all shed new light on pertinent questions regarding this cognitive domain, such as the hotly debated relationship between cross-linguistic differences in talking about time and universal principles of utterance interpretation, modelling temporal inference through aspectual interactions, as well as the complexity of the acquisition of tense-aspect relations in a second language. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Language, Culture, and Cognition (HCP 37) which discusses spatial and temporal constructs in human language, cognition, and culture in order to come closer to a better understanding of the interaction between shared and individual characteristics of language and culture that shape the way people interact with each other and exchange information about the spatio-temporal constructs that underlie their cognitive, social, and linguistic foundations.

Variation in Time and Space

Variation in Time and Space PDF Author: Anna Čermáková
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311060471X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Variation in Time and Space: Observing the World through Corpora is a collection of articles that address the theme of linguistic variation in English in its broadest sense. Current research in English language presented in the book explores a fascinating number of topics, whose unifying element is the corpus linguistic methodology. Part I of this volume, Meaning in Time and Space, introduces the two dimensions of variation – time and space – relating them to the negotiation of meaning in discourse and questions of intertextuality. Part II, Variation in Time, approaches the English language from a diachronic point of view; the time periods covered vary considerably, ranging from 16th century up to present-day; so do the genres explored. Part III, Variation in Space, focuses on global varieties of English and includes a contrastive point of view. The range of topics is again broad – from specific lexico-grammatical structures to the variation in academic English, combining the regional and genre dimensions of variation. This is a timely volume that shows the breadth and depth in current corpus-based research of English.

Space, Time, and Stuff

Space, Time, and Stuff PDF Author: Frank Arntzenius
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198705913
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Frank Arntzenius presents a series of radical ideas about the structure of space and time, and establishes a new metaphysical position which holds that the fundamental structure of the physical world is purely geometrical structure. He argues that we should broaden our conceptual horizons and accept that spaces other than spacetime may exist.

Einstein's Space-Time

Einstein's Space-Time PDF Author: Rafael Ferraro
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387699473
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This excellent textbook offers a unique take on relativity theory, setting it in its historical context. Ideal for those interested in relativity and the history of physics, the book contains a complete account of special relativity that begins with the historical analysis of the reasons that led to a change in our view of space and time. Its aim is to foster a deep understanding of relativistic spacetime and its consequences for Dynamics.