Discovering Spatiotemporal Concepts in Discourse

Abstract

How do we think about space and time, and how is this related to different contexts and situations? To what extent are our thoughts represented in languageand what can we learn from what people say about their current mindset? This chapter addresses these questions by first reviewing findings on conceptual features reflected in spatial and temporal language, and then showing how these can be discovered and analyzed in natural discourse. Speakers' linguistic choices in discourse reflect their underlying concepts in the given situation, and this enables the analyst to gain insights about relevant cognitive aspects through the analysis of language use. Cognitive Linguistics research has produced a wide range of insights on how the linguistic system (across languages) reveals human concepts of space and time. These ubiquitous domains intricately interrelated, and restricted to a limited range of conceptual patterns that have been subject to diversified analysis. Crucially for the focus of this chapter, both space and time are commonly represented throughout much of natural discourse, as speakers incorporate relevant aspects about these domains in much of their language use. Spatial relationships between people, objects, and locations are regularly conveyed through language, events are linguistically anchored in space and time, different times and events are represented in their relation to each other, and so on.

The year’s work in stylistics 2020

“…Finally in this section, another book which will be of interest to cognitive stylisticians is Cognitive Discourse Analysis (Tenbrink, 2020), a cross-disciplinary text which introduces readers to important cognitive discourse theories and provides wide ranging analytical insights into areas such as perspective, granularity, inference and other aspects of cognitive discourse analysis.…”

A cross‐linguistic study of spatial location descriptions in New Zealand English and Brazilian Portuguese natural language

“…The importance of spatial language understanding has been recognized in a wide range of studies into the nature of relative location descriptions in individual languages (Brown, 2008; Marcińczuk, Oleksy, & Wieczorek, 2016; Ragni, Tseden, & Knauff, 2007) and cross‐linguistically (Berthele, 2015; Feist, 2004; Grigoroglou & Papafragou, 2019; Majid, Jordan, & Dunn, 2015). Studies into spatial location descriptions in English are numerous, including studies of prepositions and the grammar, context, and frames of reference of spatial relation terms and the reference objects that they use (Shusterman & Li, 2016; Talmy, 1983; Tenbrink, 2017). The use of spatial relation terms in BP has received much less attention, mainly focusing on a small subset of prepositions (dos Santos Ferreira & Delazari, 2019; Kewitz, 2011; Oliveira, 2013; Rodrigues & Garcia, 2017; Rodrigues, Santos, & Lopes, 2017).…”

“…

Spatial language is used daily in human communication to enable people to describe the location of objects (Herskovits, 1985;Tenbrink, 2017). Many location descriptions in natural language take the form of relative expressions, in which spatial relation terms describe the location of objects relative to reference objects.

…”