Prescribed Spatial Prepositions Influence How We Think About Time
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-2010
Publication Source
Cognition
Volume Number
114
Issue Number
1
First Page
111
Last Page
116
Publisher
Elsevier
ISSN
0010-0277
Abstract
Prepositions combine with nouns flexibly when describing concrete locative relations (e.g. at/on/in the school) but are rigidly prescribed when paired with abstract concepts (e.g. at risk; on Wednesday; in trouble). In the former case they do linguistic work based on their discrete semantic qualities, and in the latter they appear to serve a primarily grammatical function. We used the abstract concept of time as a test case to see if specific grammatically prescribed prepositions retain semantic content. Using ambiguous questions designed to interrogate one's meaningful representation of temporal relations, we found that the semantics of prescribed prepositions modulate how we think about time. Although prescribed preposition use is unlikely to be based on a core representational organization shared between space and time, results demonstrate that the semantics of particular locative prepositions do constrain how we think about paired temporal concepts. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Recommended Citation
Published in: Cognition, Volume 114, Issue 1, January 1, 2010, pages 111-116. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier, Amsterdam, Netherlands. The final published version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.09.008
