On the concept of space in language: The case of Slovenian

The theme of this memorial lecture series dedicated to Professor and colleague Predrag Piper was by no means chosen at random: Professor Piper devoted a substantial part of his scholarly work to exploring the role of the semantic category of space, particularly within the Slavic languages, and most notably in the comparative and contrastive relationship between Serbian and Russian. In his comparative and contrastive studies, Slovenian was by no means a foreign tongue to him; in fact, his connection to it was deeply personal, as it was his mother’s native language, and thus, in some measure, his own as well. In the discussion that follows, my point of departure will be two of his seminal works: the monograph Pronominal Adverbs (Grammatical Status and Semantic Types), published in 1983 in Novi Sad, as part of the Linguistic Studies series (No. 5) and based on his doctoral dissertation, and his study Language and Space (Belgrade, XX Century Library, 91, 20012). Certain words, and even entire classes of words, can function as potential spatially motivated linguistic metaphors. Each word class, in fact, encompasses spatial expressions which, by fostering the conceptualization of space, operate as spatial metaphors. Spatially motivated expressions are thus also spatially iconic. Within these spatial expressions or metaphors, the semantic category of space is present to varying degrees of intensity. Consequently, the question of how space is expressed is closely tied to the role of relational words and expressions. From the perspective of word classes, these are primarily adverbs, prepositions and particles, with adverbs playing both a foundational and central role. In this discussion, adverbs, prepositions and particles are therefore linked by spatial iconicity, spatial metaphor and conversion, a linguistic-systemic (categorical-syntactic) reclassification, within the categorization of word classes that share the same morphological form. In the word classes mentioned, spatial iconicity is clearly observable, and it is also morphologically embedded in verbs, for instance in the form of spatially iconic prefixes. More broadly, the category of space is incorporated both into lexemes and into lexical relations, and it illustrates how different perceptions of space, and of the world in general, can be expressed in ways that are partly similar and partly different across different linguistic systems. Each of these systems contains a theory of spatial grammar, and by extension, a theory of spatial metaphors. We may assume that the conceptual-semantic category of space, within the framework of spatial grammar theory, can exert a decisive influence on topicalization through the segmentation of word order. It is also possible that the spatial dimension, in analyses of variable word order, has been given too little emphasis.