Keywords
spatial expressions, model theoretic semantics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, cognition
Abstract
It is argued that spatial expressions come together with an encoding of the space called "aspect", which changes as we climb up the syntactic tree. The changing nature of aspect is necessary in order to simplify the meanings of elements. What appears to be a rather peculiar property of an element will be perfectly natural once we acknowledge that the elements compute on the space viewed in a particular way. Coordinates are always rooted in the landmark, for example. Thus, for the purpose of the distinction between static and dynamic it is not the "absolute" motion of the figure that counts, but the motion relative to the landmark.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Kracht, Marcus
(2015)
"Aspects of Space,"
Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication:
Vol. 10.
https://doi.org/10.4148/1944-3676.1097
References
Bennardo, Giovanni (ed.). 2002. Representing Space in Oceania—Culture in Language and Mind. Pacific Linguistics. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
Brown, Cecil H. 1983. ‘Where Do Cardinal Direction Terms Come From?’ Anthropological Linguistics 25: 121–161.
Esfeld, Michael (ed.). 2012. Philosophie der Physik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Fong, Vivienne. 1997. The Order of Things: What Directional Locatives Denote. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University.
Klein, Wolfgang. 1994. Time in Language. London: Routledge.
Kracht, Marcus. 2002. ‘On the Semantics of Locatives’. Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 157–232.
Kracht, Marcus. 2008. ‘The Fine Structure of Local Expressions’. In Anna Asbury, Jakub Dotlacil, Berit Gehrke & Rick Nouwen (eds.) ‘The Structure of Local P’, 35–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1996. ‘Frames of Reference and Molyneux’s Questions: Crosslin- guistic Evidence’. In Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel & Merrill F. Garrett (eds.) ‘Language and Space’, 109–169. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition. Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. No. 5 in Language, Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Niikanne, Urpo. 2003. ‘How Finnish Postpositions See the Axis System’. In Emile van der Zee & John Slack (eds.) ‘Representing Direction in Language and Space’, No. 1 in Explorations in Language and Space, 191–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Norton, John D. 1995. ‘Mach’s Principle before Einstein’. In Julian Barbour & Herbert Pfister (eds.) ‘Mach’s Principle: From Newton’s Bucket to Quantum Gravity’, 9–58. Boston: Birkhäuser.
Palmer, Bill. 2002. ‘Absolute spatial reference and the grammaticalisation of perceptually salient phenomena’. In Giovanni Bennardo (ed.) ‘Representing Space in Oceania’, 107–157. Canberra: ANU Press.
Smith, Sheldon. 2007. ‘Continuous Bodies, Impenetrability, and Contact Interaction: The View from the Applied Mathematics of Continuum Physics’. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58, no. 3: 503–538.
Svenonius, Peter. 2008. ‘Projections of P’. In Anna Asbury, Jakub Dotlacil, Berit Gehrke & Rick Nouwen (eds.) ‘The Structure of Local P’, 63–84. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s.
van Lambalgen, Michiel & Hamm, Fritz. 2005. The Proper Treatment of Events. Oxford: Blackwell.
Zwarts, Joost& Winter, Yoad. 2000. ‘Vector Space Semantics: AModel–Theoretic Analysis of Locative Prepositions’. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 9 169–211.