Use of Parallel Texts as a New Approach to Spatial Cognition : The Case of English and Czech
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Using the first chapter of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its four Czech translations, we demonstrated that in Czech, a spatial relationship may be realized by constructions at the morphological level (inflections in particular), which serves the semantic function of a preposition. English, on the other hand, does not take advantage of similar constructional means for verbalizing a spatial relationship. In this respect, we suggest that our data point to a radically conventional nature of grammar (Croft, 2001), i.e. that the large part of the construals is arbitrary. We also believe that a systematic employment of parallel texts in the future research will prove fruitful in tracing discrepancies and inconsistency across languages through literary master-pieces. |
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