Distance in Language: Grounding a Metaphor

The conceptual metaphor of "distance" plays a crucial role in current perceptions of the world and humans' various interactions within it. It hardly seems possible to conceptualize space and time, emotional involvement in events, and relationships with other people in terms other than "distance". As a consequence, this primarily spatial concept figures prominently in the verbal expression of these abstract notions, and is thus highly relevant for the analysis of linguistic phenomena. In recent decades, "distance" has been employed as a fruitful tool in different, primarily cognitive and functional, approaches. However, the explanatory power of this notion suffers from certain inconsistencies: On the one hand, very different linguistic phenomena are described in terms of "distance", while, on the other, the notion itself relates to disparate concepts.

By providing a thorough grounding of the metaphor of distance, the present volume makes this notion tangible and thus applicable in various domains of linguistic analysis. The contributions gathered in this volume provide a concise delimitation from neighbouring concepts, and explore the rich potential of this metaphor for the analysis of the semantics, usage conditions and discourse-pragmatic effects of both morpho-syntactic categories and syntactic structures. They also investigate the role of "distance" in understanding mechanisms of linguistic interaction. The languages covered in this volume include, amongst others, languages from the Germanic, Romance and Slavic families, as well as Japanese and Turkish.