What is it about?
This paper is a comparative study based on the linguistic evidence in Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek, aimed at reconstructing the space-time cognitive models used in the Proto-Indo-European language in a diachronic perspective. I argue how in these ancient languages the passage took place from an archaic Time-RP model or non-deictic sequence, in which future events are behind or follow the past ones in a temporal sequence, to the more recent ‘post-archaic’ Ego-RP model that is found only from the classical period onwards, in which the future is located in front and the past in back of a deictic observer.
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Why is it important?
I show that early Indo-European had not made use of spatio-temporal deixis based on the tense-related ego-perspective FoR found in modern languages.
Perspectives
This paper frames Proto-Indo-European data broadly in terms of current theoretical discussions of spatial construals of time. In fact, Indo-Europeanists have rarely confronted their results in a fruitful way with recent research in other fields, such as cognitive linguistics. This manuscript draws attention to the contribution which historical/comparative, namely Indo-European linguistics can give to a deeper comprehension of the origin and the development of the space-time metaphor.
Annamaria Bartolotta
Università di Palermo
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This page is a summary of: Spatio-temporal deixis and cognitive models in early Indo-European, Cognitive Linguistics, February 2018, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/cog-2017-0023.
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