A Panoramic Overview of Generating/Interpreting Spatial Descriptions of Objects/People and Their Relations

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Pages: 91-111
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/BCOV1785

Abstract:

The present study aims at revealing the coordinated efforts of speaker and recipient in generating and interpreting spatial descriptions of objects/people and their relations. The study focuses on spatial cognitive reference frames, and types of deictic center. It also deals with specific syntactic structures, verbs of existence and motion in space as well as some ways of expressing existential meaning through metonymy and metaphor. The study is based on a linguistic corpus of English sentences collected for the purposes of the research. The paper includes comments on parallels between reference frame spatial roles and the components of the communicative situation as well as the possibilities of deviation from the ideal spatial cognitive reference frame, and the ideal deictic center.

Keywords:

spatial cognitive reference frames; deictic center; contrastive generative grammar; existential sentences; nexus constructions.

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