Cartographic Structures

MARIELA AGUILERA

Paris

Seminario; Mental maps, paper maps, e-maps; 2019

ENS, EHESS

Maps are a little bit like pictures and a little bit like language, but they constitute a representational system on their own. Like pictures, they exploit a spatial isomorphism, and like languages, they are composed of semantically arbitrary elements that play different syntactic roles. In this presentation, I will argue that maps have a predicative structure. However, due to their spatial isomorphism, the structure of maps differs in interesting ways from the structure of language. In this direction, I will argue that there are some restrictions on the capacity of maps for expressing general thoughts and relations.