Perspectival location, spatialized mental travel and grammatical construction

MANGIALAVORI RASIA, MARÍA EUGENIA; GONI RASIA, GUILLERMINA M; RASIA, MARTA L

Vitoria Gasteiz

Seminario; Basque Research Group of Theoretical Linguistics SemiLinUPV-EHU; 2023

Basque Research Group of Theoretical Linguistics

Findings from a range of cognitive fields find a unified account in a recent proposal about spatialized mental travel. We attempt a comprehensive conceptual/grammatical account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time, represent it in spatial terms, and how innovative language varieties are progressively using projective spatial prepositions to find a grammatical expression of this cognitive resource. Such constructions combine (i) spatialized mental travel; (ii) perspectival location; (iii) egocentric reference frames, producing complex expressions of location in an economical way. If correct, an empirically clear sample would emerge where language reveals this imagistic machine and how we use it.In the discussion, some novel distinctions are evaluated: external versus internal viewing of time/space; ‘‘watching” time versus projective ‘‘travel” through time; mental spatiotemporal travel in episodic memory (episodic motion) versus mental spatiotemporal travel in semantic memory (projective/perspectival motion). Theoretical, empirical, and applied implications are discussed, keeping the focus on the grammar and distributional semantics of spatial Ps in Spanish, new systematic uses, and lexical coding.