Time and Space in Natural Language

The first definition of "time" in the Oxford English Dictionary is "a space or extent of time". The first definition of "space" is "denoting time or duration". These circular definitions demonstrate the congruity between time and space as concepts. 

In the context of multimodal environments, spatial and temporal information has to be represented, exchanged, and processed between different components using various modes. In particular, spatial and temporal knowledge may have to be extracted from natural language and further processed, or general knowledge involving spatial and temporal information may have to be expressed using natural language.

Understanding temporal and spatial information in natural language or generating natural language to express temporal or spatial meanings, implies: (1) identifying the linguistic elements conveying this information (markers), (2) elucidating its semantic (and pragmatic) content, (3) devising suitable systems of representation to process this content, (4) implementing and using those representations. The basic linguistic markers for temporal notions in many languages are verb tenses (present, past, perfect) and temporal adverbials (yesterday, to-morrow, two weeks from now). Primary linguistic markers of space are spatial prepositions (in, on, under, below, behind, above) and verbs of motion (arrive, cross).

Speaking about space and time concepts, realized in the literary text we should pay attention to the markers, which reveal its entity. The point is that each text contains the place, the period of the action, and its performer. In a narrow sense we may observe the events which take place in the period of several minutes, hours, days. As to the events from the broad point of view we can investigate the plot taking into consideration the concrete date, year, century. Both these markers can be presented implicitly or explicitly.

Pyatak M.

The importance of ethnolinguistics in modern science

Ethnolinguistics is a field of linguistic anthropology which studies the relationship between language and culture, and the way different ethnic groups perceive the world. A well-known (but controversial) ethnolinguistic subject is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which states that perception is limited by what can be described in one's own language.

Ethnolinguists study the way perception and conceptualization influences language, and show how this is linked to different cultures and societies.

Ethnolinguistics is frequently associated with minority linguistic groups within a larger population, such as the Native American languages or the languages of immigrants. In these cases, ethnolinguistics studies the use of a minority language within the context of the majority population, and it also studies the perception of the language by the majority population, for example whether the ethnic group receives state support to keep their language alive. More generally, ethnolinguistics studies the relationship between language and culture, and the way different ethnic groups use their language to perceive the world.

The common to ethnolinsuistics science is psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines with non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain; for example, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right.

Salenko Oksana