Space, Time, World

by Michael Fortescue

Although major cognitively based studies of SPACE and TIME in language have appeared in terms of “Frames of Reference”, these do not extend to a wide selection of the world’s languages, nor do they combine SPACE and TIME in the overarching concept of WORLD, which has its own corresponding frames of reference. The aim of relating and unifying these concepts and their expression across languages constitutes the unique thrust of the present book, which will represent a significant extension of earlier approaches. Among its main conclusions will be that the complete separation of terms for SPACE and TIME is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon, rather than just a metaphorical extension of the latter from the former. The book will be of interest to all students and practitioners of Linguistics, in particular Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic typology, but also to a more general readership interested in the historical evolution of concepts of SPACE and TIME.

231 pages, Hardcover

Published February 5, 2024

Reviews

[Lachlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderful book, despite running to little over 200 pages, can be fairly described as ‘compendious’. The author, with unerring authority, takes the concepts of space, time, world, being and other staples of millennia of philosophical speculation and turns them this way and that, through multiple dimensions, revealing with evidence from scores of languages spoken across the globe how human beings have come to understand the environment in which they live their lives. Each of the 18 chapters is suitable for an hour’s read, to be followed by another hour of the thoughts it has inspired. There are chapters on Einsteinian and quantum physics, on the ages of deep time, on the fictional world(s) of a Chekhov play, on a boy’s growing understanding of his village, on how different linguacultures ascribe dimensions to their surroundings, and much more. Everything is brought together under the aegis of Popper’s three worlds, the world of physical objects and states, the world of mental states and processes and the world of thought, culture, and the products of human creativity. Any review of this length cannot do justice, of course.