| Abstract [eng] |
The aim of the present article is to overview some possible approaches to structuring space or, in other words, how entities are located in the world. The first spatial reference a man learned to use was ego. The linguistic system for talking about space relative to a man’s egocentric origin and coordinate axes is called the deictic system. This system allows integrating expression information into the whole of contextual information. In written discourse, there are two types of deictic situation: internal, which is related to the entities being described, and external, which is related to the real world. Research in cognitive linguistics has broadened the study of spatial expressions and focussed the analyses not only on the meaning of single lexical items, but also on the way in which spatial concepts are mapped onto a linguistic form and used to structure space. Holistic Spatial Semantics proposes that there exist seven universal spatial semantic categories: Trajector, Landmark, Motion, Frame of Reference, Region, Path and Direction that should be universal in all languages. It is hard to imagine a language which would be able to dispense with them: all languages operate in the spatio- temporal framework. |
