Distance in Language: Grounding a Metaphor

Anastasia Meermann · Barbara Sonnenhauser

Jun 2015 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Ebook

297

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Eligible

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About this ebook

The conceptual metaphor of “distance” plays a crucial role in current perceptions of the world and humans’ various interactions within it. It hardly seems possible to conceptualize space and time, emotional involvement in events, and relationships with other people in terms other than “distance”. As a consequence, this primarily spatial concept figures prominently in the verbal expression of these abstract notions, and is thus highly relevant for the analysis of linguistic phenomena. In recent decades, “distance” has been employed as a fruitful tool in different, primarily cognitive and functional, approaches. However, the explanatory power of this notion suffers from certain inconsistencies: On the one hand, very different linguistic phenomena are described in terms of “distance”, while, on the other, the notion itself relates to disparate concepts.

By providing a thorough grounding of the metaphor of distance, the present volume makes this notion tangible and thus applicable in various domains of linguistic analysis. The contributions gathered in this volume provide a concise delimitation from neighbouring concepts, and explore the rich potential of this metaphor for the analysis of the semantics, usage conditions and discourse-pragmatic effects of both morpho-syntactic categories and syntactic structures. They also investigate the role of “distance” in understanding mechanisms of linguistic interaction. The languages covered in this volume include, amongst others, languages from the Germanic, Romance and Slavic families, as well as Japanese and Turkish.

About the author

Barbara Sonnenhauser is Professor of Slavic Linguistics at the University of Zurich. Her research interests include verbal categories, synchronic and diachronic aspects of South Slavic syntax, and the interaction of semantics and (discourse-)pragmatics, as well as various questions in the fields of general linguistics and linguistic semiotics. She has most recently been concerned with perspectival phenomena, discourse structure and narrativity.

Anastasia Meermann is a PhD candidate and Research Assistant at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the LMU Munich. Her research interests include questions concerning syllable structures, as well as issues in Balkan linguistics. In her PhD dissertation, she focuses on the semantics and pragmatic functions of the Serbian tense system, particularly as concerns the effects of auxiliary variation.

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