The language of space: notes on the construal of our experience of motion through space

All languages provide their speakers with the resources for construing their experience of the world around them and inside as meaning (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999). They model their experience of different phenomenal realms as meanings — as semantic models, more specifically as the ideation base of the semantic model or meaning base of a language (op cit.); and they do this prototypically in dialogic interaction, beginning with the onset of construing experience in the life of young children (see Painter, 1999). The construal of experience is thus intersubjective rather than simply subjective (cf. the work by Colwyn Trevarthen, e.g. 1987). Language has thus made it possible for humans to operate with a “collective brain” (see e.g. Christian, 2004).

In construing these semantic models of different phenomenal realms, speakers draw on the experiential resources of language, but obviously they also draw (1) on other semiotic systems such as gesture, drawing, and mathematics, the particular mix of resources depending on the context of construal, and (2) on the bio-semiotic system of perception.

Here I will be concerned with one particular phenomenal realm of experience — the realm of space. In terms of phenomenal realms, space is a feature of physical systems, i.e. systems of the first order of complexity in a typology of systems ordered in complexity (see e.g. Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999: Ch. 13; Matthiessen, 2007), , but it is “manifested” within all systemic orders. (i) In biological systems, space is part of the physical world in which life unfolds: organisms “model” space, using the bio-semiotic systems of perception to develop neural models of space that they can use to navigate around space. (ii) In social systems, space is given social value; it is constructed socially in terms of the territory of a community, personal and public space, and so on (cf. Hall, 1966, and more recently the “sociology of space”) and the organisms engagement with space — position in and movement through space — is also constructed socially. (iii) In terms of semiotic systems, space is construed semantically as part of our ideation base (see Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999), where it is modelled as a spatial ontology (see Bateman et al., 2008).

The semantic model of space construed in a language is also the most holistic model of space in human engagement with space. This follows from the general principle that language is the one system that serves to bring together and to integrate various other human systems that can be located neurologically in different parts of the brain. This point has been developed and emphasized in the last couple of decades by scholars coming from different disciplines and different traditions (e.g. Bickerton, 1995; Deacon, 1997; Edelman, 1992; Halliday, 1995; Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999); Michio Sugeno has made the point that language is the only human system into which we can “translate” other human systems.

Not surprisingly, languages vary considerably in how they construe space, although broad generalizations are no doubt possible. Thus languages vary in how they construe both static location in space and dynamic motion through space (cf. Lemmens, 2005), and in how these two different “phases” of location in space complement one another in the construal of motion through space (see Slobin, 2004a: Sections 2.6.2, 4.1). In the construal of motion through space, languages seem to vary in how the two modes of construing experience in language, the logical and experiential modes, complement one another (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, 1999: Ch. 7; Matthiessen, 2004) and they also vary with respect to the division of labour between spoken language and gesture (cf. McNeill, 2000; Slobin, 2004a,b).

Against this background, I will explore certain aspects of the language of space in this talk. I will draw on ongoing research by a group of us in the Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The exploration will include centrally a discussion of the construal of our experience of motion through space (investigated in topographic procedures in Matthiessen, 1998) — an area of intense research, much of it inspired by Talmy’s work (e.g. 1983, 1985, 1991, 2000, 2007) and also by Slobin’s work (e.g. 2004a,b), and reference to the deployment of the semantic model of space to non-spatial domains of experience (cf. Dreyfus & Jones, 2008).

References

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Dreyfus, Shooshi & Pauline Jones. 2008. Making sense of place: further descriptions of circumstance of location. [From: http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1183&context=artspapers ix/09]

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