Language and Space Marcus Kracht Department of Linguistics, UCLA 3125 Campbell Hall PO Box 951543 Los Angeles, CA 90095–1543 [email protected] March 15, 2007 2 Introduction Foreword My own interest in space and language was sparked off by the regularities I ob- served in the case systems of Finnish and Hungarian. Though the facts are often obvious and have been pointed out many times in the literature, I was surprised to find that most literature is concerned only with the morphological aspects of space, and that there seemed to be very little on semantics. The more I looked into the matter the more I discovered how fascinating the area is; I also learned that there is a lot of material on space and language, but it tends to be somewhat lesser known. There is a noticeable trend to take the linguistics of space more serious also from a theoretical point of view. The present book does not attempt to provide a typological survey, nor is it uniquely theoretical in character. I have tried to create a synthesis between lin- guistically oriented investigation (involving syntax, morphology and historical de- velopment) and formal ones (which include the mathematical structure of space and other spatial concepts). Inevitably, some parts of the book will be hard going for a linguist and they might therefore disapprove of my overly formal stance. Yet, I hope that such readers will benefit nevertheless from this work even if they skip such sections. On the other hand, when formal accounts of meanings can be given I think they should be given. This is what science is about: trying ones best at rendering our ideas precise. The following book grew out of lectures that I gave at the University of Cal- ifornia, Los Angeles. I am indebted to my students, Leston Buell, Ben George, Ben Jones, Ben Keil, Maja Korzeniowska, Nicholas Lacasse, Brook Lillehaugen, Nathan Porter, and Marcus Smith for their input. Also, I benefitted from discus- sions with Peter Svenonius as well as various people that have been subjected to talks on various aspects of that matter. Los Angeles, March 15, 2007 Marcus Kracht Introduction 3 Introduction Considering the importance space plays in everyday life, the amount of linguistic research that has gone into space and spatial expressions is rather small. Within semantics, the literature on tense and aspect by far exceeds that on space, not to mention binding theory and other areas. From the perspective of a syntactician, spatial expressions do not seem to offer fundamental insights into language the way binding theory does. Yet, this seems to me to be a prejudice. Investigating the language of space has several advantages: • The domain of space and location is fairly well-understood due to its funda- mental role in physics and other sciences. Compare that to our understand- ing of propositional attitudes. • Every human being is capable of reasoning spatially with some accuracy. Living in this world we certainly need to be able to reason successfully about space and motion. • The domain is reasonably well-defined and small enough so that one can study it in an exhaustive way in all its relevant aspects. This is very impor- tant, since language is a very complex system and there is no hope at the moment to understand how language works as a whole. Typically research is done on certain facets of it (syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, and so on) without knowing how it all works together. Recently, one notices a growing interest in space and spatial reasoning. However, most work that appears is concerned with the cognitive aspect of it. Where it has been studied from a linguistic point of view, it is often considered foundational in the sense that many people believe that spatial representations are cognitively pervasive (just think of the way in which we use space to visualize almost any abstract concept, or in which spatial talk is used in language all over the place). Yet, the way in which spatial reasoning is used can only be studied if we know how it actually works in the first place. This is to say that there is a need to understand the way locative expressions work in language before we can assess the truth of the idea that everthing we do and say somehow derives from spatial cognition and spatial talk. Even though language is seen by many linguists as part of the human cognitive faculty, there are genuine linguistic questions that the cognitive research often does not touch on. It is therefore high time that the linguistics of space gets more attention. 4 Introduction The present material intends to fill that gap. They summarize the state of the art in the area, as well as point out directions of further research. I shall deal with space and language in all its morphological aspects. Thus I shall cover not only the meaning and use of locative cases but also of locative prepositions, motion verbs, and so on. Moreover, locatives will be looked at from a morphological, syntactic, semantic and diachronic point of view. The book is organized as follows. We start with a chapter that reviews some basic facts about space and its mathematics. We sometimes go into some mathe- matical depth, but the reader who does not feel up to complicated formulae may well skip that chapter. Often, just a good intuition about space is sufficient to get by. The chapter shall show that the description of location typically follows a certain general pattern, which is to identify an origin, then establish a coordinate frame, and finally locate the object inside that frame. Once the abstract aparatus is in place it is easily understood how that can at all work; however, as we shall see, there are alternatives to this (and, unsurprisingly, there is variation inside and across language as to whether and to what extent they use them). The next three chapters elaborate the structure; in Chapter ?? we shall develop the way in which location is talked about, in Chapter ?? we turn to motion. Finally, in Chapter ?? we shall deal with entire sentence by looking at the way in which location and motion are integrated into the event structure. Chapter ?? studies the semantics of spatial expressions once again in formal terms, incorporating the insights from the previous chapters. Chapter ?? studies the morphological side: how many and what kind of distinctions are found in the languages of the world; this is the typological part of the book. Finally, in Chapter ?? we look at the historical development leading to and from expressions of location and motion. Spatial expressions—A Précis Consider the following sentence. (1) John threw a banana over the fence. What is that sentence telling us? It tells us that as an act of John’s throwing, the banana is flying over the fence. There are a couple of things that we can infer: • It is the banana that is moving, not John. John is causing it to move by throwing. Introduction 5 • The banana is first in John’s hand, at the end of the event however it is on the opposite side of the fence. • The banana is moving by going up and then down, and it crosses the fence. It is actually not possible to say where exactly the banana ends up unless we know where John was standing when he threw the banana. Without that knowledge all we can say is that it is on the other side of the fence at the end. This is important. It often happens that we cannot locate things absolutely, only relative to certain other things. But this is very often not problematic; all we need to know about locations is typically relative location. Now, the phrase /over the fence/ specifies a direction of movement of a certain object. This object is called the trajector. The innermost DP, /the fence/, is called the landmark. An alternative terminology is this. One also speaks of figure in place of ‘trajector’, and of the ground in place of ‘landmark’. The first pair (trajector/landmark) is best suited for moving objects, the second suggests rather a nonmoving objects. We shall take the liberty to use both terms depending on occasion. So, the trajector moves in a certain way with respect to the landmark. Now, two elements come into play: first, there is an element, called locator, which defines a location from the landmark. One and the same landmark can give rise to several locations. The phrase /next to the fence/, /under the fence/, /on the fence/, all specify different positions to be in. In the present case, the locator is /above/; it defines a region that is above the landmark, at some nonzero distance. The next element is called a mode. It specifies the path that the trajector is taking on the basis of the location just defined. In the present circumstance, the path is something like: move into the location and then out of it. The fact that the movement is also first up and then down is inferred from the meaning of /throw/ as well as general knowledge. An airplane can be said to fly over Paris, even when the motion is horizontal. Thus we have at least four elements to worry about: the trajector, the lnnd- mark, the locator and the mode. Various questions arise: Given a sentence, which of the explicitly or implicitly given objects is the landmark? This may be obvious is the case of a locative PP, but in other cases this is less straightforward. Given a sentence, which of explicitly or implicitly given objects is the tra- jector? (This is the question of orientation.) 6 Introduction Given a landmark and a location, which locator is defining that particular location? It will turn out that many factors go into the choice, such as the shape of the landmark, sometimes also the shape of the trajector, and occa- sionally morphological factors.