Directional adverbs and the encoding of path in Danish - a diachronic perspective

Description

Danish directional adverbs (DDA) (op ‘up’/ned ‘down’/…) are used extensively to locate an object (thing, person, institution) in dynamic and static motion events (Talmy 2000), encoding spatial characteristics about the path (with the preposition): vandet løber ned i afløbet ‘the water is running down into the drain’. This use is found in all spatial settings, from micro- to macrolevel, cf. hun løber ned i køkkenet ‘she runs down into the kitchen’.

However, the use of DDAs in different spatial settings is not a question of pure scale (cf. Mark et al. 2011), the uses seem to cluster around different, prototypical spatial situation types anchored in routinised social practice in physical and socio-cultural landscape (Tuan 1991, Hovmark 2011), and each type coming with a certain amount of conceptual restrictions and typical lexical content (cf. the conference website: “table-top”, “in-house”, “in-village”, “macroscale relations on a geographic level”; cf. also collostructional analyses). For instance, the common macro-scale use of DDAs is typically used to refer to motion and location in physical or socio-cultural landscapes, the deictic viewpoint often being a prototypical ‘home’ and the goal often being persons or places of activity or residence: hun går op/ned/over/om/… til skolen (og tilbage/hjem igen) ‘she is going up/down/over/around/… to the school (and back/home again)’. The landscape use also strongly profiles the goal, cf. om i skolen (’around in the school’) vs. om bag gardinet (’around behind the curtain’).

Furthermore, the landscape use not being confined to “natural” physical surroundings, but also to city landscapes etc. (de gik ud til universitetet ‘they went out to the university’) invites to a further discussion of the definition and use of the terms ‘landscape’, ‘ecology’ and ‘the natural world we inhabit’ (Levinson 2011).

Period	30 May 2016
Event title	Geographic grounding: Place, direction and landscape in the grammars of the world
Event type	Conference
Location	København, DenmarkShow on map