Use of Parallel Texts as a New Approach to Spatial Cognition : The Case of English and Czech
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Prepositions have been a well-investigated area in cognitive linguistics, with already quite a number of studies addressing the conceptual or constructional aspect of their use (Lakoff 1987, Tyler and Evans 2003, among others). However, most of these studies are based on either intuition or (a comparison of) mono-lingual corpora at the best, so the issue of how speakers of different languages verbalize their understanding of space in the same usage event remains rather under-explored. In view of this gap, we propose to look at the English over and its Czech counterparts by using the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland and its Czech translation as our research material. One of our most striking finding is how differently the two languages distinguish between static or dynamic terms (Dušková 2006), i.e. whether the trajector in a conceptual scene is stationary or in motion. While English uses over to code both static and dynamic relations, in Czech we observe a functional split between nad (literally 'above') and přes (literally 'across'). Moreover, a deeper look into the parallel texts uncovers discrepancies in the above static/dynamic distinction in English and Czech: What is perceived as dynamic in English is, in some cases, expressed by static preposition in Czech. We observe that in Czech, a spatial relationship may be realized by constructions at the morphological level (inflections in particular), which serves the semantic function of a preposition. Use of a preposition in such case would be redundant or even ungrammatical. English, on the other hand, does not take advantage of similar constructional means for verbalizing a spatial relationship. We conclude that our study reveals the radically conventional nature of grammar (Croft 2001), especially how language utilizes available constructional means to code spatial relationship. We in addition hope to show the usefulness of parallel texts as a new methodology in the study of spatial cognition across languages. |
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