animacy and spatial terms

[George Lakoff]

>On Wed, 17 Jun 1998, George Lakoff wrote:
>
>> There's a huge literature on spatial terms in cognitive linguistics. What
>> kinds of examples were you thinking of?
>>
>> George
>
>I was wondering whether anyone had looked at possible effects on the use
>of any spatial term due to either exchanging an inanimate Ground for an
>animate Ground, or an inanimate Figure for an animate Figure, in a scene
>that is otherwise the same.  For example, if I had a picture of a hand
>holding a coin, and exchanged a dish for the hand (at the same curvature),
>without making any other changes, would that influence the use of "in"?
>
>More generally, I'd like to know if you know of any work that examines the
>animacy of either the Figure or the Ground as a factor that speakers use
>to assign a spatial term to a scene, including references about languages
>that don't allow the same term to be used with both animate and inanimate
>Figures/Grounds (Scott DeLancey mentioned Tibeto-Burman as one that
>doesn't allow the same term to be used for human and inanimate Grounds).
>
>Thanks for any help,
>
>Michele
>
>Michele Feist
>Department of Linguistics
>Northwestern University
>2016 Sheridan Road
>Evanston, IL 60208
>
>m-feist at nwu.edu

Dear Michelle,

Is this the kind of thing you have in mind:

In English, you can say "I went to the President" but not "*I'm at the
President."
Compare "I went to the White House" and "I'm at the White House."

Suppose Harry is lying on the ground. You can say
        My jacket is across Harry
if it is on top of him stretched across him, but not if it is on the other
side of him. Compare with
        My glass is across the table
        *My glass is across Harry
The latter is out even if Harry is stretched out on the floor and my glass
is on the other side of him.
        By the way, Postal's old live/nonlive distinction does not occur in
this case:
        *My glass is across the corpse.
is no good, even if the corse is spread out in front of you on the floor
and your glass is on the other side.

English is a good language to look at for such phenomena.

Incidentally, metaphor matters here. "He's always at his mother" works only
in the metaphorical sense of "at."
Compare with "He's always at his mother's"  and "He always goes to his mother."

Other interesting phenomena:
        I came across Harry.
cannot be used if you ran into him on the street. It works fine if Harry is
treated as an object:
        I came across Harry unconscious in a dumpster.
Here Postal's live/nonlive distinction does matter. If you came across
Harry's dead body, you can't describe it as
        I came across Harry in the morgue.

English is fun.


Enjoy!

George