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Spatio-temporal deixis and cognitive models in early Indo-European

  • Annamaria Bartolotta EMAIL logo
From the journal Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

This paper is a comparative study based on the linguistic evidence in Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek, aimed at reconstructing the space-time cognitive models used in the Proto-Indo-European language in a diachronic perspective. While it has been widely recognized that ancient Indo-European languages construed earlier (and past) events as in front of later ones, as predicted in the Time-Reference-Point mapping, it is less clear how in the same languages the passage took place from this ‘archaic’ Time-RP model or non-deictic sequence, in which future events are behind or follow the past ones in a temporal sequence, to the more recent ‘post-archaic’ Ego-RP model that is found only from the classical period onwards, in which the future is located in front and the past in back of a deictic observer. Data from the Rigveda and the Homeric poems show that an Ego-RP mapping with an ego-perspective frame of reference (FoR) could not have existed yet at an early Indo-European stage. In particular, spatial terms of front and behind turn out to be used with reference not only to temporal events, but also to east and west respectively, thus presupposing the existence of an absolute field-based FoR which the temporal sequence is metaphorically related to. Specifically, sequence is relative position on a path appears to be motivated by what has been called day orientation frame, in which the different positions of the sun during the day motivate the mapping of front onto ‘earlier’ and behind onto ‘later’, without involving ego’s ‘now’. These findings suggest that early Indo-European still had not made use of spatio-temporal deixis based on the tense-related ego-perspective FoR found in modern languages.

Acknowledgements

This article has been developed from a conference paper presented at the 12th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, ICLC-12 (University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, June 2013). I would like to thank the editors of this journal and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and constructive suggestions on an earlier version of this paper.

List of abbreviations

RV

Rigveda

Il.

Iliad

Od.

Odyssey

imp

imperative

sbjv

subjunctive

opt

optative

inj

injunctive

ptcp

participle

ger

gerund

inf

infinitive

prs

present

impf

imperfect

fut

future

aor

aorist

pf

perfect

ppf

plusquamperfect

mid

middle

pass

passive

nom

nominative

gen

genitive

dat

dative

acc

accusative

voc

vocative

abl

ablative

ins

instrumental

loc

locative

prt

particle

neg

negation

indef

indefinite pronoun

du

dual

adv

adverb

emph

emphatic

cp

comparative

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Received: 2014-8-29
Revised: 2017-5-31
Accepted: 2017-6-4
Published Online: 2018-2-14
Published in Print: 2018-2-23

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