Space and Time in Language and Literature

Space and Time in Language and Literature
Space and Time in Language and Literature
Edited by
Marija Brala Vukanoviü

and Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
Space and Time in Language and Literature,
Edited by Marija Brala Vukanoviü and Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
This book first published 2009
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2009 by Marija Brala Vukanoviü and Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-0567-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0567-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Tables and Figures ......................................................................... vii
List of Abbreviations................................................................................ viii
Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Capturing Space and Time: Mission (Im)Possible
Marija Brala Vukanoviü and Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
PART I: Space and Time in Language
Chapter One............................................................................................... 22
Typological Issues Regarding the Expression of Caused Motion:
Chinese, English and French
Henriëtte Hendriks, Yinglin Ji, Maya Hickmann
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 39

The Many Ways to be Located in French and Serbian:
The Role of Fictive Motion in the Expression of Static location
Laure Sarda & Dejan Stošiü
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 61

The Story Of “o”: Force Dynamics In the Semantics of (Croatian)
Prepositions
Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 87
Verifying the Distributional Bias Hypothesis: An Analysis of Tamil
Lavanya Sankaran
vi Space and Time in Language and Literature
PART II: Space and Time in Literature
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 104

Fictional Topographies Diluting the Polarity of the Centre
and its Margins: A Comparative Account of the Late
Nineteenth-Century English and Croatian Novelists
Sintija ýuljat
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 116

Space and Time in Literature: William Faulkner and Southern Gothic
Biljana Oklopþiü
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 129

The Notions/Issues of History in Postmodern Literature: Kurt Vonnegut
Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 144

Transit Space, Transit Time: Terrorism in Postcolonial Fiction
Pia Brînzeu
Contributors............................................................................................. 153
Index of Names........................................................................................ 157

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
The overall expression of information components in Chinese, English

and French ........................................................................................... 35
Locus of the expression of CAUSE component ........................................ 35
Selection of other information components in Verb.................................. 36
Selection of other information components in Other devices.................... 36
The overall density of information in three languages .............................. 37
The density of information in Verb ........................................................... 37
The density of information in Other devices ............................................. 38
Neutral location verbs in French and Serbian............................................ 44
Posture verbs in French and Serbian ......................................................... 45
The size and the composition of the corpus............................................... 47
Translation of Serbian posture verbs into French ................................. 47-48
Sample of fictive motion verbs............................................................. 52-53
Translation of fictive motion descriptions from French to Serbian
and vice versa....................................................................................... 53
Functional motivation of semantic profiling ............................................. 65
The ON-IN scale of spatial meaning categories ........................................ 67
Vandeloise’s hierarchy of prelinguistic concepts ...................................... 69
The ON-IN gradient decomposed.............................................................. 71
The production task – Chart 1 ................................................................... 95
The production task – Chart 2 ................................................................... 95
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ACC Accusative case

ATTCH attachment
CNC Croatian National Corpus
ENG English
DIM dimensionality
F Figure (the object being located)
FLA First Language Acquistion
FM Fictive Motion
FR French
G Ground (the object with respect to which F is being
located)
NFM Non Fictive Motion
OR orientation
PREP preposition
RVC Resultative Verb Construction
SL Sattelite framed languages
SLA Second Language Acquistion
SR Serbian
V verb
VL Verb framed languages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank all the people who have contributed to this work in
various ways. In particular, we wish to thank Katherine Hayles and
Henriette Hendriks for valuable input and support with academic expertise
on the topic. A warm thank you to all the contributors, who invested a
great deal of time, effort and enthusiasm in pursuing the intriguing issues
of space, time and their interrelation.
We also wish to acknowledge the kind support of Carol Koulikourdi and

Amanda Millar from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, as well as express
our huge debt of gratitude to William Candler.
This project required a lot of patience, not just from all the participants,
but also from our families. For bearing with us on this long journey, we
thank Dean, Zoran, Mia and Roko. Unfortunately, we cannot promise to
stop discussing space and time in any near future.

and
Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša
INTRODUCTION
CAPTURING SPACE AND TIME:

MISSION (IM)POSSIBLE
MARIJA BRALA VUKANOVIû

AND LOVORKA GRUIû GRMUŠA
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one
that asketh, I know not.
—St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book 11
I do not define time, space, place and motion, as being well known to all.
—Isaac Newton in the Scholium to the Principia, 1687
Space and time, their infiniteness and/or their limit(ation)s, have been
intriguing people for millennia. Issues relative to the character of space
and time have indeed been central to philosophy from its inception.
Various aspects relative to space and time are nowadays at the core of
many scholarly disciplines. Linguistics and literature are no exceptions in
this sense. This book brings together eight essays which all deal with the
expression of space and/or time in language and/or literature.
The first section—Time and Space in Language—contains four papers
which focus on linguistics i.e. explore issues relative to the expression of
time and space in natural languages. Three articles explore the expression
of space from various perspectives. The topics under consideration
include: typology regarding the expression of spatial information in
languages around the world (Ch.1), space as expressed and conceptualized
in neutral, postural verbs and verbs of fictive motion (Ch. 2), and
prepositional semantics (space as a force dynamics rather than a
geometrical i.e. topological concept—Ch.3). Chapter 4 explores the issue
of aspectuality (in Tamil), drawing a comprehensive picture of which
aspectual and tense markers interact with different verb types. All the
articles propose innovative topics and/or approaches, crossreferring when
possible between space and time. Given that they all seem to propose at
2 Introduction
least some elements of “language universality” vs. “language variability”,

the strong cognitivist nature of the approach (even when the paper is not
written within a cognitive linguistic framework) represents a particularly
strong feature of the section, with a strong appeal to experts from fields
that need not necessarily be linguistic. In other words, the issues under
consideration propose analytic elements and findings possibly appealing to
anyone with an interest in the topic(s) of space and time, their interrelation
as well as their universality, ontological status, metaphorical potential and
so on.
The second section of this volume—Space and Time in Literature—
brings together four essays dealing with literary topics. These papers aim
at demonstrating that space and time capture the imagination like no other
scientific subject. Inherent in each narrative are both temporal and spatial
implications; if a literary text is situated in a certain time, it is from and
about a certain period, as well as about a certain space, even if virtual.
Another particularly strong feature of these papers is that they envision
space and time as complementary parameters of experience and not as
conceptual opposites, following the transfer of perspective through an
entire century. Departing from the late nineteenth century fictive spaces of
England and Croatia, the topic moves via the American Southern Gothic,
focusing on Faulkner from the thirties to the early sixties, via the the post-
WWII perspectives on history, probing the postmodern context of
temporality, to finally reach the contemporary era of post 9/11 space-time.
The voyage from chapter five to eight is thus a journey through space and
time that allows for some answers to the nature of reality (of a variety of
space-times) as conceived by both the authors of these essays as well as by
the authors that these essays discuss.
Why did we decide to focus on the topic of space and time? Why do we
believe that the topic is worth pursuing, why do we see it as being both
interesting and promising for scholarship? The answers to these questions
are, again, perhaps most exhaustively spelled out in two parts, one relative
to space and time in language, and the other discussing space and time in
literature. Let us begin by considering the interest that the topics under
consideration have attracted within the field of linguistics.
1.1. Space and time in language

Natural language expressions for spatial and temporal phenomena have
long been recognized as being extremely puzzling and closely
interconnected. Both abstract notions have very slowly and laboriously
evolved within Western thought; for over two millennia space and time
Capturing Space and Time: Mission (Im)Possible 3
have intrigued thinkers and served as fertile grounds for vivid discussions.
One of the claims that distilling various, frequently opposed views on the
topic has slowly yielded is the idea that space and time are fundamental
intuitions built into our nature (let us just recall the notion of space
proposed as a universal cognitive primitive within the Kantian tradition).
As already pointed out above, linguistics has been no exception in this
sense. From the surface, lexical level to the deep, cognitive one, many
linguists have focused on a) the (mis)matches between the physical and
the linguistic; b) the fact that both in the literal and metaphorical realms of
language, similar terms are often used in both domains. This comes as no
surprise given the conceptual primacy of space and time, as well as the
many and close relations between the spatial and temporal domains.
The “conceptual primitiveness” of space and time has been revisited
once again in the past thirty years, becoming a particularly attractive and
prolific topic within the scientific framework of cognitive linguistics. With
the advent of cognitive linguistics, semantic and/or syntactic particularities
of spatial and temporal language, the relations between space and time in
language, and the interplay between (spatial and temporal) language and
conceptualization came, once again, into the focus of scholarly studies,
becoming, to a large degree, one of the milestones of research within the
discipline. Indeed, it is beyond any doubt that studies of spatial and
temporal language and conceptualisation have been of fundamental
importance in the development of cognitive linguistics. These studies have
become a platform for revisiting some notions that had almost been
outcast from serious science, such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (cf.
Gumperz and Levinson, 1996). Ultimately, studies of spatial and temporal
language and conceptualisation have provided a rich source of information
for linguists, psychologists and other scholars interested in the issues of
language, mind and their relations (cf. e.g. Bloom et al. 1996, Gentner, &
Goldin-Meadow, 2003). Let us now take a look at some of the approaches
to investigation of these issues.
We begin by observing that research in comparative linguistics as well
as research in cognitive linguistics have revealed that there is a
considerable variation in the ways in which different languages categorize
space and time in order to talk about it (cf. e.g. Aurnague, Hickmann &
Vieu 2007; Hickmann & Robert 2006). At the same time, we know that
categorization, i.e. unveiling the principles and parameters underlying it,
represents one the key approaches to most if not all research fields,
(psycho)linguistics being one of them. Looking at things from this
perspective, we immediately note two very puzzling issues: a) is there a
way to reconcile crosslinguistic variation in the different (semantic and
4 Introduction
syntactic) categorization of space and time in natural languages?, and b) is

there a way to reconcile crosslinguistic variation in the categorization of
space and time in natural language(s) on the one hand, and the frequently
proposed universality underlying language as a faculty of the human
cognitive system? In other words, the analysis and explanation of the
language–cognition relation, which basically is the primary task of
cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics1, is inextricable from the
analysis and explanation of the universal cognitive determinants
underlying language vs. the language specific and/or culture specific in
language, as well as of the causal relation between the two. It is, indeed,
this latter element of analysis that seems to be the greatest source of
information relative to the former, i.e. relative to both universality and
language specificity. In fact, by studying (cross)linguistic expressions of
space and time, focusing on universality vs. the language specificity (e.g.
typological studies, which lie at the core of all four papers in the
linguistics section of this volume), linguists hope to gain insight into the
cognitive level of language. This hope is pursued by addressing a series of
concrete research question, some of the best known, most widely
researched and most influential in this work, being listed below:
x How is the conceptual relationship between spatial and

temporal domains reflected in the application of spatial and
temporal terms, and, furthermore, does the application of
spatial terms in temporal contexts reveal consistent patterns
in the conceptualization of the two domains?
x Extending the analysis of language use from the
intralinguistic to the crosslinguistic: is it possible to identify
a universal subset of spatial and temporal meanings that are
expressed in all languages (as suggested by e.g. Talmy
2000)?
x Are there neuropsychological constraints on the nature of
possible spatial and temporal meanings i.e. on what could be
talked about and thus lexicalized in natural languages (see
e.g. Jackendoff 1996; Landau and Jackendoff 1993, Talmy,
2000)? And, relatedly, does spatio–temporal language
1
There still seems to be some confusion relative to the distinction between these
two fields. It appears that the best way to look at the common vs. distinctive
features of cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics is that, while pursuing the
same goal of solving the language—mind riddle, the former reverts primarily to
linguistic and the latter to psychological tools i.e. methodologies.
depend upon prelinguistic spatio-temporal schematisations

(as suggested by e.g. Mandler 1996), and if so, how?
x Does the representation of the ‘human body’ as a spatial
“source domain” play a role both in the structure and in the
acquisition of (spatial and temporal) language (see Lakoff
1987)?
And finally:
x Does (spatial and temporal) language interfere with spatial
cognition (in e.g. the comprehension of spatial and temporal
expressions), i.e. does crosslinguistic variation in (the
semantics of) spatial and temporal categories bring about
differences in the non-linguistic spatial and/or temporal
cognitive processes of speakers of different languages (as
suggested by e.g. Bowerman and Choi 2001; Levinson 2003
etc.)?
Answers to these questions are very important not just in themselves,

but also as they help shed light on the issue of the structure and the
ontological status of (spatial and temporal) concepts in both language as
well as in other sub-systems of human cognition. In other words, pursuing
answers to the above questions represents a necessary step on our way
toward the solution of a puzzling, fundamental, but still very controversial
issue of the relation between language and thought.
In order to gain a full appreciation of the problem(s) we outlined above,
and try to properly justify the great interest that the research of spatial and
temporal language has been attracting in recent times, we need to point to
two more facts pertaining primarily to the domain of space. First, we need
not forget that spatial cognition is seen as being at the heart of our thinking
(spatial thinking invades our conceptions of many other domains as
diverse as time, social structure or mathematics—cf. e.g. Levinson 2003).
Shifting the perspective slightly, from the developmental point of view we
note that spatial words are frequently cited as prime evidence for the claim
that children’s first words label non-linguistic concepts. These two facts
represent two further arguments supporting the great scholarly interest in
the relation between language and space. Given all the above, spatial
words are seen by most scholars as good candidates for the search in the
field of the universal (perhaps also primitive, innate) in language. It is
perhaps because of these facts that, while being dedicated to both space
and time, three out of four papers in the linguistics section put their
primary focus on the issue of space in language.
6 Introduction
Bearing in mind all that has been said above, one question is duly
reiterated at this point: if what has just been claimed about the universality
(primitiveness) of spatial language is justified, how are we to account for
the fact that languages vary substantially in their semantic structuring of
space (cf. e.g. Bowerman & Choi, 2001, Levinson 2003; Talmy 2000).
Furthermore, and perhaps most interestingly, how are we to explain the
fact that increasing evidence seems to suggest that children are sensitive to
language-specific structural properties of the language they are acquiring
from the one-word stage of development. It has, in fact, been shown that
different linguistic patterns in linguistic input influence the meanings of
children’s spatial words from as early as 18 months (cf. e.g. Bowerman
1996a, 1996b; Choi et al. 1999; Bowerman and Choi 2001). In the final
analysis we necessarily wonder: is there hope, and possibly even a way, to
reconcile all these contradictions relative to the findings about the
relationship between the semantico-syntactic linguistic (at times seemingly
incommensurable) parameters in the domains of space and time on the one
hand, and the physical and psychic unity—or rather universality—of
mankind (see also Levinson and Wilkins, 2006)?
The arguments put forth in the articles presented in the linguistics
section of this book seem to suggest that it is indeed possible to posit a
positive answer to this question. Shifting between space and time, different
grammatical categories, and, crucially, between a number of different
languages, each of the papers presented in the linguistics section of this
volume explores some aspect of the universality and/vs. linguistic
specificity of spatial and/or temporal universals in language. Furthermore,
all the papers contribute, in one way or another, to the pool of elements of
universality in language, that might not just be underlying typological
patterns, but, possibly, even be related to the deep level of language, or
rather, possibly, determining an interrelation between language and mind.
In the first paper of the linguistics section, “Adults’ Expression of
Caused Motion in Chinese, English and French” the authors Henriëtte
Hendriks, Yinglin Ji, and Maya Hickmann address the issue of language
specificity vs. linguistic universality by investigating some elements
regarding the typological frameworks as proposed by Talmy (1975, 1985,
2000) and Slobin (2000, 2004). Focusing on the expression of spatial
information in languages around the world, the paper provides a detailed
insight into the patterns of expression of caused motion in Chinese native
speaker adults. The method used for gaining this insight is that of a
cartoon-based production task. The results obtained from these Chinese
native speaker adults are compared to the results obtained from English
and French native speaker adults. The paper examines the following four
aspects in detail: the expression of the Cause component; the devices

encoding Manner and Path of motion; the selection of information
components; and the overall density of information. The results indicate
that from the typological point of view, Chinese does not fully pattern with
either English or French. Thus, when it comes to the expression of caused
motion, Chinese shows a hybrid profile (resembling, on the one hand,
English and showing features of satellite-framed languages, and
demonstrating, on the other, also characteristics of verb-framed languages,
being in that respect similar to French). The authors conclude that Chinese
should be classified as an equipollent language (as proposed by Dan
Slobin). The data presented in the paper furthermore shows that
typological factors affect what information speakers express in verb and
other devices, and how they organize this information in the discourse as a
whole.
The second paper, entitled “The many ways to be located: the
expression of fictive motion in French and Serbian” authored by Laure
Sarda & Dejan Stošiü, is another paper with the primary focus being put
on spatial language. The paper investigates the correlation that exists
between neutral verbs (e.g. “the book *is* on the table”), posture verbs
(e.g. “the book *is lying* on the table”) and fictive motion (e.g. “the road
*descends* towards the coast”) in the expression of static spatial scenes in
French and Serbian. The exploration is based on translation data. This
paper shows that in order to express static location with inanimate figures,
French makes use of either neutral verbs or fictive motion, whereas
Serbian can also use posture verbs. Since French makes limited use of
posture verbs, it uses fictive motion in reference to some situations
described by posture verbs in Serbian. The lack of an extensive use of
posture verbs in French makes fictive motion more salient. In the
conclusion, the authors try to place their study in a cognitive context, and
do so by asking how such cross-linguistic differences in attention to fictive
motion affect human spatial cognition.
While also focusing on space, in chapter 3, “The story of 'o'. Force
dynamics in the semantics of (Croatian) prepositions” by Marija Brala
Vukanoviü, the focus is shifted from verbal to prepositional semantics.
Exploring the (seemingly very unsystematic and unrelated) usages of the
Croatian preposition “o”, the author proposes a view of this preposition
that differs significantly from those usually proposed by grammarians and
lexicographers. Departing from the claim that space (in language) is not an
abstract entity described by geometry and/or topology, but rather a
dynamic conceptualization based on and represented through our everyday
experience (in and with space) in the world, the meaning of “o” is
8 Introduction
explored from the cognitive perspective, and its analysis grounded in

Talmy’s Force Dynamics framework. This allows us to show that the
Croatian preposition ‘o’ can be semantically explicated as a lexical item
which codes a logically ordered sequence of dynamic exchange / kinetic
situations. It is extremely interesting that this analysis shares many
typological and analytical elements with comparable analyses of
prepositional systems in other natural languages, and, most interestingly,
that it shares a number of features with the prepositional crosslinguistic
analysis by Bowerman and Pederson. The relativistic issue is left out of
focus in this paper, but the possibility of there being a pool of semantic
universals, that force-dynamic elements proposed in this paper are seen as
belonging to, does speak in favour of a strong language-mind relation.
The linguistic section closes with a paper by Lavanya Sankaran, which
gives more prominence to the temporal elements in language. In
“Verifying the Distributional Bias Hypothesis: An Analysis of Tamil“
Lavanya explores Aspect, an element of verb mechanics that refers to the
way in which a verb’s action is distributed through the space-time
continuum. The author explores the validity of the aspect hypothesis with
regard to the Tamil language. She does so by testing whether adult native
speakers of Tamil are influenced by the inherent semantic aspect of verbs
when they use aspect and tense markers. Although a number of FLA
studies of English, French, Spanish and Italian support the aspect
hypothesis, it is nevertheless the case that such studies have not been done
on non-European languages. While being a non-European language, and
thus of extreme interest for further exploring the aspect hypothesis, Tamil,
as one of the oldest Dravidian languages, makes a particularly interesting
field of study as it uses separate linguistic devices to code distinctions
between both tense and aspect. The fact that aspect marking is not
obligatory in Tamil, but that the marking of tense is, also makes important
predictions for the aspect hypothesis. The aspectual markers incorporated
in this study are “iru” (auxiliary for the perfect or progressive aspect),
“kondiru” (progressive) and “vidu” (perfective). These markers were
integrated into a comprehension task, a production task and an imitation
task which have been carried out with three adult native speakers of Tamil
from Singapore. By examining and consolidating data from these three
different performance modalities, the study draws a comprehensive picture
of which aspectual and tense markers interact with which verb types, thus
also attempting to verify the aspect hypothesis with regards to adult native
speakers of Tamil.
1.2. Space and time in literature

Apart from being inextricably interwoven in all aspects of life, when it
comes to literature, the temporal and spatial parameters of human
experience move beyond their familiar dualism and are merged into space-
time, inherent in every narrative work. The activity of narrating a story
correlates with the temporal character of human experience. Thus, time is
articulated through a narrative mode, while narrative acquires its full
meaning when embedded in temporal existence (Ricoeur 1984). On the
other hand, a literary text always testifies of a certain space. The text itself
occupies a place, it is a presence, even when we look at it on computer
screens—it is there—spatial. These facts demand that the analysis of both
foundational categories in literature be treated together, which is why this
volume brings together essays capturing both space and time.
In connection to temporal and spatial parameters of narrative analysis,
Bakhtinian chronotope takes the lead in merging the two into an
intersection of time and space. Although abstract thought can be related to
time and space as separate entities, defining them apart from the emotions
and values attached to them, Bakhtin observes that “living artistic
perception (which also of course involves thought, but not abstract
thought) makes no such divisions and permits no such segmentation”
(Bakhtin 1994: 243). In literature and art, he claims, the temporal and
spatial are inseparable.
Since Bakhtinian chronotope stresses the importance of temporal and
spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature, and it can
be traced in each of the literary papers of this volume, it is only fair to
apply this perspective to our investigation. The analysis of literary
chronotopes proves that they are highly sensitive to historical change.
Different societies and periods result in different chronotopes both inside
and outside literary texts, which is visible in Brînzeu’s text on the
postcolonial chronotope. But, they can also be transhistorical in structure
and not unique to particular points in time. A great example of such a
chronotope is discernible in chapter six which can be referred to as the
Southern Gothic chronotope, not so much connected to time as to the
space of the U.S. South, and its political and cultural distinctiveness and
isolation. Specific chronotopes shape themselves in some kind of relation
to the exterior conditions/space-times in which they arise, implying a
unique correlation between a particular, historical intra-textual world, and
an equally particularized extra-textual world—traces of which can be
found in all four essays of the literary section.
10 Introduction
In order to try and explain the topic better, some details about the
narrative must be introduced first. We must recall Russian Formalists and
their distinction between the way in which an event unfolds as a brute
chronology (fabula), and syuzhet, where the “same” event is ordered in a
mediated telling of it, and having a construction (plot) in which the
chronology might be reversed so as to achieve a particular effect. This
implies that events in complex narratives do not occur in a sequence
arranged by chronology, but their order could be “recovered,” as it were,
by rearranging the “distorted” pattern of events back into their “proper” or,
as it is sometimes called, their “real-life” chronology, which we know is
just our perspective of chronology. Therefore, stated in the most basic
terms, “a particular chronotope will be defined by the specific way in
which the sequentiality of events is “deformed" (always involving a
segmentation, a spatialization) in any given account of those events”
(Holquist 2002: 114).
Underlying this idea of separation between story and plot is an old
assumption, revealing a fundamental discrepancy between literature and
life: the assumption that in literature events can be variously arranged,
following any sequence, whereas in real life they are always
chronological. This principle reflects a general tendency of the early
Formalists to make absolute distinctions between literature and lived
experience. Bakhtin does not accept a distinction between “conventional”
and “real” time as foregrounded by Formalists; he embraces the category
of dialogism, where the chronotope is grounded in simultaneity at all
levels, including those of literature and life. There is no purely
chronological sequence inside or outside the text, as shown in the essays
by Oklopþiü, Gruiü Grmuša, and Brînzeu. These papers display the above
contingency in a variety of ways, one of which is constant overlap
between life and art in all of their analyzed fiction.
In accordance with this view is Einstein’s idea about the inseparability
of time and event: something happens only when something else with
which it can be compared reveals a change in time and space. An event
will depend on how the relation between what happens and its situation in
space-time is mediated. But, the means by which any plot deforms any
particular story will depend not only on formal (“made”) features in a
given text, but also on generally held conceptions of how time and space
relate to each other in a particular culture at a particular time (“given”
features). The point cannot be stressed enough: chronology of events is
always interpreted in different ways at different times, being shaped by the
presumptions certain space-time emanates and the priority it gives to
events and causation.
As we know, different types of reality have unfolded since the

beginning of time, for reality is never given, but it is an outcome of
society’s culture. For centuries, Western society nourished an image of
reality that was of an actual presence. A person lived in a certain time and
space, and when he wasn’t present, he wasn’t there. This gave an
impression of reality as real, stable, absolute, and complete (as opposed to
nowadays). It revealed a linear and closure–oriented spatio-temporal
trajectory within perfectly closed spatial figurations, predicating a
unidirectional, linear, teleological temporality progressively moving
towards completion, from life to death or more symbolically from
mortality to eternity (in accordance with religious views). Virilio2 labeled
that era as one of extensive space and time, “a space where duration of
time was valued” (Virilio in Dercon 2001: 71), and whatever lasted briefly
was as if not having existed at all. Such a closure–oriented pattern is
detectible in the texts of Hardy and Kovaþiü, as interpreted by ýuljat.
Written at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, their
novels testify of specific chronotopes: Hardy’s by moving away from the
Victorian centre and into the localized, indefinite marginal space, and
Kovaþiü’s through spiritual decolonization and self-assertion, advocating
the Croatian right to national independence.
All four essays of this section take us on a journey through space and
time in literature, displaying a variety of chronotopes, from the late
Victorian era of British and Croatian landscape and circumstances,
through Southern Gothic regionalism and Faulkner’s geographical and
historical milieu, to postcolonial and postmodern chronotopes of the
contemporary age.
Sintija ýuljat in “Fictional Topographies Diluting the Polarity of the
Centre and its Margins: A Comparative Account of the Late Nineteenth-
Century English and Croatian Novelists’” seeks to define the convergence
of the fictional space in Thomas Hardy’s and Ante Kovaþiü’s work.
Declining the existent euro-centric cultural stereotypes founded on polarity
of the metropolitan and provincial in the European novel, ýuljat argues the
two contemporaries compose their respective novelistic space-time by
means of an autonomous narrative of creative topography. Her paper adds
to comparative discussions of national literatures in light of their local
space-times.
ýuljat’s essay advances a methodology for incorporating creative
fiction into research on spatial figures and unique spiritual landscapes. It
2
Virilio worked both on space and time. During the sixties he focused on
geopolitics, geometry, space, and topology, and from the seventies on, he
dedicated his work to topics like time, speed, and dromology.
12 Introduction
argues that Hardy’s and Kovaþiü’s literary texts offer fresh perspectives on
the overlapping layers of experience which characterize temporal and
spatial cultural circumstances, bringing together the historical, the global
and the local within a single, multiply constituted, “imagined space.”
Literary accounts of this kind can be characterized as a data source in their
own right, complementing social science research methodologies
grounded in “real-life” observation and offering hypotheses for subsequent
verification of topographic modes. Through the narrative process of
metaphorical transfer and characters’ lapsing to the margins and into
mystified space-times, ýuljat demonstrates that although Hardy and
Kovaþiü chronologically belong to the pre-modernist generation, their
texts create a singularly modernist narrative stance against the linear
realistic narrative plane.
Although the next essay entitled “William Faulkner and Southern
Gothic” takes us across the ocean and into the antebellum U.S. South,
where we encounter the specific Southern Gothic chronotope, there are
some similarities in themes treated by Hardy and Kovaþiü, and Faulkner
and his Southern Gothic predecessors and contemporaries. All of these
authors were labeled as regionalists, contrasting agrarian and industrial
ways of life, and displaying the discrepancies between national and
regional ideals. While painting a vivid picture of rural life in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century, they testify of a specific space-time
that informed literature. A peculiar trait that repeats itself in their novels is
that characters are constantly encountering crossroads, symbolic of a point
of transition.
This recalls another Bakhtinian chronotope, that of a “threshold,”
highly charged with emotion and value, whose “most fundamental
instance is as the chronotope of crisis and break in life” (Bakhtin 1994:
248). It is connected with the crucial decisions one has to make that
determine her/his whole life, familiar in Hardy, Kovaþiü, and Faulkner,
which after the moment of crisis occurs become a place of renewal and
epiphany. The social relevance of such narrative representations is further
demonstrated by their involvement in mainstream discourses, thereby
illustrating how they articulate with existing social norms and how they
serve against the backdrop of social structure.
Biljana Oklopþiü in “William Faulkner and Southern Gothic” takes
issue with Southern Gothic’s emergence, topics and demythologization, at
the same time exploring the techniques and methodology but also the
specific space-time that Faulkner as a Southerner depicted. Oklopþiü
argues that Southern Gothic has been determined by a certain region of
space (the U. S. South) during an interval in time (the Southern past and
even present). The strength of Oklopþiü’s approach is the persuasive

connection it forges between temporal and spatial metaphors inherent in
Southern texts, and the transhistorical structure revealed in the specific
Southern Gothic chronotope.
As if shielded from the mainstream standards and quick and pervasive
change brought about by the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. South
remained distinct and marginalized from the U.S.A. and sank deeper into
social and political isolation. Refusing to be entrapped within the
technological apparatus and feel like appendages to machines, the
Southerners chose what they referred to as a natural and patriarchal way of
life, while the rest of the Americans, as Oklopþiü writes, viewed them as
morally degenerate since they separated from the essentially American
ideals of chastity, capital, and industrialization,. The juxtaposition of these
views is visible in Southern Gothic writing. Laden with supernatural and
ironic motifs and grotesque characters whose purpose is to explore social
issues and highlight aspects of Southern culture (with a twist), Southern
Gothic literature testifies to this unique space-time embedded in Southern
regionalism burdened with history. Faulkner, probably the most famous
Southerner, dealt with the past of his native soil through Gothic tropes,
blending the history, settings, and atmosphere of the American South with
unconventional plots, while disrupting linear and chronological narrative,
using stream of consciousness techniques and fluidity of interpretation.
This experimentalism on Faulkner’s part suggests that there has been a
collapse of culture modes in modernism that brought about a shift,
displacing the major ways that made sense of culture and the world in the
past, and knocking them off center while newer paradigms have started to
contest that space. The reality that has emerged, along with acceleration of
temporality, offers a growing awareness of living a multiplicity of times
and of moving in different directions, while developments in transport and
communication technologies render the world both more extensive and
considerably “smaller” at the same time.
Thus, the commonsense conceptions of time and space have radically
modified in the second half of the twentieth century. The geographic
mobility of capital with investments placed all over the globe intensifies
the demographic mobility of industrial societies. The alienated, migrating
worker of modernity further metamorphoses into his postmodern
counterpart, who is taking along his family, fragmented by the loss of a
sense of place and community. People are now faced with the dissolution
of the traditional support system formerly provided by the extended family
which is detectible in both modern and postmodern literature, and
specifically in some novels analyzed by Brînzeu and Gruiü Grmuša. The
14 Introduction
weakening of the sense of belonging to a place and its people and temporal
scales, constantly on the move, has made the individual spatially
disoriented and temporally accelerated.
This takes us to our last two chapters dedicated to postmodern space-
time and literature. The defining characteristic of postmodern chronotopes
is closely tied to our condition of postmodernity, and that is the shortening
of commonsense perceptions of time, which is presented in both Gruiü
Grmuša’s and Brînzeu’s essays. The long pasts and futures of our
ancestors have collapsed. The loss of temporal bearings has created new
generations who are now made to live more intensively in the present: “the
present is all there is” (Harvey 1989: 240). Future expectations are
lowered further by conscious or repressed fears of a future that will be
used up before it arrives, either by nuclear catastrophe, terrorist attacks, or
by the damage perpetrated every day on the environment, claiming the
entropic pull. The loss of a sense of living and participating in a historical
continuity (delineated by traditional values and beliefs) and the collapse of
future expectations define the continuous present established in
postmodern society.
Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša in “The Notions of History in Postmodern
Literature: Kurt Vonnegut” offers a postmodern approach to history as
viewed through the perspective of the post-WWII literary generation.
Vonnegut, as a representative of early postmodernists, Gruiü Grmuša
claims, provides a different angle of vision of truth, history and
temporality in general, variously colored by their subjective
origins/observers. Focusing on the specificities of time phenomena in
literature, Gruiü Grmuša’s essay is a substantial contribution to the
conception of reality, underlining the internal experiences of perception
and indicating that connections between postmodern literature and
history/science are more than metaphoric, because the boundaries
separating fiction/fancy from fact/truth have themselves been dissolved.
Both Gruiü Grmuša’s and Brînzeu’s essays acknowledge that
postmodern narrative time often focuses on the moment of the narrative
present at the expense of larger temporal developments. The moment is
not envisioned as a self-identical instant of presence, but as partaking in an
indefinite number of different, and sometimes mutually exclusive
temporalities. The fact that different sequences contradict one another and
can easily be replaced in a different order without changing things, for
there are no causal relations, makes temporal patterns increasingly difficult
to grasp in view of a variety of moments, each split into multiple versions
of itself, embedded in intricate and sometimes logically impossible
recurring structures, and appearing as a series of slices that correspond to
each other. However, this does not mean that time is sucked into space as
some cultural theorists of our age claim, opting for “spatial turn” (Sayer
1985, Jameson 1991). Consequently, the postmodern texts, including
Vonnegut’s novels as analyzed by Gruiü Grmuša, deny closure–oriented
spatio-temporal structures and feature unrecognizable, unstable characters
struggling for autonomy in a world in which various systems oppose their
identities, preventing the individual’s ability to seize control of the
processes that surround him/her.
Reality projected in Vonnegut’s novels is typical of postmodern
chronotopes. The author mixes historical data with fleeting memories and
fiction, manipulating space-time, fracturing it, and revealing general
cultural interest in short time spans. Gruiü Grmuša argues that the
novelist’s attempt to explore the simultaneous rather than the sequential
structure of time as a means of organizing narrative exposes human time
as just one among a multiplicity of temporal scales, one that can no longer
be considered the measure and standard of continuity. Hence, Vonnegut’s
works portray the multiplication of divergent time scales within
predominantly Western spaces, displaying temporal discontinuity in the
individual and social domains, and underlying the uncertainty regarding
any relevant description of past and future.
Pia Brînzeu in “Transit Space, Transit Time: Terrorism in Postcolonial
Fiction” discusses the transit space-time of the postcolonial and post-
postcolonial period. The new era, Brînzeu claims, where globalization and
reorganization of the economy but also the presence of evil (terrorism) has
influenced modifications in real living conditions, and changed our
commonsense conceptions of space and time. Brînzeu’s readings illustrate
how problematic the assertion of a place is in the light of post 9/11
occurrences where penetrability and vulnerability of the post-postcolonial
era homogenize places even if they remain differentiated by internal
specificities.
What remains after post-colonization is a chronotope of “nowhere” and
“never” (Said 1994), where postcolonialism becomes, as Brînzeu notes, a
space and time of transit, of territorial and ethnic specificities and
multiplicities. But colonization continues, only now a different kind,
where technology colonizes the world through globalization and also
colonizes bodies, their attitudes and behaviors. Brînzeu’s and Gruiü
Grmuša’s texts testify to these colonizations and display how collective
memory has been reconstructed, modified, and endowed with political
meanings.
The authors such as Fullerton, Vonnegut, and Foden, analyzed in the
last two chapters, balance fact and fancy, experimenting with forms,
16 Introduction
incorporating historical figures, public testimony, and other real data with
historical falsifications and fiction, revealing the entropic condition of
postmodern history. Like other postmodernists, these authors agree that
nonverbal experience can only be described and not reproduced, even
when history is in question. They believe history becomes highly distorted
through language, which is why historical testaments must be regarded
with a certain skepticism. Historical perspective is thus just a narrative,
often based on political or social bias, a presentation of ideals, heroes and
villains, but also providing moral and exemplary behavior for future
generations (White 1973, 1987).
As the blurred boundaries between documentary, memory, and the
fictive of personal experience (and history) have become more intensively
theorised, creative writing is re-emerging as an important resource in
social science, penetrating both factual and fictional spaces. All the four
chapters of the literary section focus on and link real and fictive space-
times, trying to grasp their complex relationship and the meanings of
temporal and spatial parameters detected within the texts interpreted by
ýuljat, Oklopþiü, Gruiü Grmuša, and Brînzeu. Possessing singular and
context-dependent structures and significations, each of the novels
analyzed displays its chronotope, intersecting space and time, exposing
“the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1994: 84).
1.3. Conclusive remarks

Most books available on the topic of the expression of time and space
deal with the theme either from the linguistic or from the literary
perspective. One of our aims in compiling this volume has been to try and
propose a unified view of the problem departing from different
perspectives. In our words, the main goal of the editors has been to bring
together different scientific traditions which can contribute complementary
concerns and methodologies; from the literary and descriptive via the
diachronic and typological explorations all the way to cognitive
(linguistic) analyses, bordering psycholinguistics and neuroscience. One of
the strengths of this volume thus lies in the diversity of perspectives
articulated within it, where the agreements, but also the controversies and
divergences demonstrate constant changes in society which, in turn,
shapes our views of space-time/reality. This also suggests that science and
literature are not above or apart from their culture, but embedded within it,
and that there exists a strong relativistic interrelation between (spatio-
temporal) reality and culture. Our only hope to envisage objectively any if
not all of the above, is by learning how to move (our thought) through
space, time or, to put it in simpler terms, how to shift perspectives.
Our rationale behind this volume is a simple but, in our view, strong
one: we firmly believe that it is only by broadening our horizons, or rather
working from a multidisciplinary or possibly interdisciplinary perspective,
that we can ultimately hope to achieve some objective insights into any
topic, more so when the topic is as general and as universal as time and
space are. Detailed analyses within single frameworks can, and at times
do, create disbalance between the need for objectivity on the one hand, and
a just interpretative flexibility or rather potentiality on the other. Any
finding relative to the domains of time and space needs to be verified or at
least “verifiable” from different perspectives, if it is to hold any claims to
scientific validity. Our book aims at providing the platform for exactly this
type of approach.
References
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Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
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M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & M.
Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bloom, P., Peterson, M. A., Nadel, L. & Garrett, M. F. (Eds) 1996.
Language and Space. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Bowerman, M. 1996a. Learning how to structure space for language: A
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Peterson, L. Nadel, & M. F. Garrett (Eds). Cambridge, MA: MIT
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—. 1996b. The origins of children's spatial semantic categories: Cognitive
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Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, ed. John Armitage, 69-81. London,
Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
18 Introduction
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PART I:
SPACE AND TIME IN LANGUAGE

CHAPTER ONE
TYPOLOGICAL ISSUES REGARDING

THE EXPRESSION OF CAUSED MOTION:
CHINESE, ENGLISH AND FRENCH
HENRIËTTE HENDRIKS, YINGLIN JI,

MAYA HICKMANN
Abstract
In this paper, we will discuss and investigate some issues with respect
to the typological frameworks as proposed by Talmy (1975, 1985, 2000)
and Slobin, (2000, 2003) regarding the expression of spatial information in
languages around the world.
In 1985, and in an updated version in 2000, Talmy proposed a
typology for the expression of motion in language. In essence, he proposed
that there are two main types of language, verb-framed and satellite-framed
languages. Slobin more recently proposed that the situation may actually
be better described as a clyne where some languages are clearly verb-
framed and others are clearly satellite-framed, but some may be
somewhere in-between. The in-between languages Slobin (2006) names
“equipollent”. In this paper, we will study in detail one of the languages
that Slobin classifies as equipollent, i.e., Chinese, and we will show how
reference to space, and more particularly, caused motion, in this language
works differently from languages in the other two groups.
The paper focuses on the expression of caused motion in Chinese
native speaker adults in a cartoon-based production task, and compares
these results with findings regarding English and French. Three aspects are
examined in detail: the selection of information components; the devices
encoding Cause, Agent Action, Manner and Path of motion; and the
density of information overall. It is found first of all that the Cause
component is highly frequent in all three languages compared, but that it is
expressed via very different devices. Further, English demonstrates a clear-
cut pattern of placing the components Cause and Agent Action together in
main verbs and the Path component in other devices. On the other hand,
Typological Issues Regarding the Expression of Caused Motion 23
French main verbs usually encode 1 or 2 components with Path

information most frequently expressed. Chinese differs from both. Finally,
where the distribution of information in English seems to be quite
homogenous within and across subjects, both Chinese and French tend to
distribute motion components across devices with more variety, though
Path is typically found in main verbs and Agent Action outside. The results
indicate that from the typological point of view, Chinese does not fully
pattern with either English or French.
1. Introduction
In the last three decades, an important body of research has been
devoted to reference to space in language. In particular, researchers have
tried to determine the typological features of the lexicalization of spatial
information. The main researcher in the domain is Leonard Talmy, whose
seminal works (1975, 1985, 2000) on this issue have been used by many
researchers to classify a large array of Indo-European and more “exotic”
languages in different typological groups. Talmy first established what
types of information would have to be expressed in an utterance for it to be
a spatial expression. He concluded that the basic motion event includes a
motion verb, a figure (entity to be located), a ground (entity with respect to
which the figure is located), and a path (the trajectory followed by the
figure with respect to the ground). Two other types of information
frequently found beyond the basic scheme include the manner of motion,
and the cause of motion. Having determined the basic information, Talmy
then researched what information is typically expressed in what parts of
speech, and originally proposed a three-way classification of languages.
This first classification held constant the linguistic means studied, i.e., the
verb, rather than keeping the type of information constant. Based on a
thorough survey, Talmy concluded that all Indo-European languages
except the Romance languages tend to express Motion and Manner in the
verb, whereas Romance and Semitic languages tend to express Motion and
Path in the verb. The third group of languages was found to combine
information about Motion and the Figure in the verb. An example of such
a language is Atsugewi, and an English example of such combination of
information in the verb would be to rain, which encodes the entity moving
(the rain) and its motion, as in “it is raining”.
In later works, Talmy held constant the main informational component
in the motion event, i.e., Path, and studied its expression in the sentence.
This resulted in the following, now most prominently used, typology:
some languages express path in the verb (henceforth called verb-framed
24 Chapter One
languages). Other languages typically express the path information in

satellites (satellite-framed languages).
Slobin, interested in the expression of spatial information in child
language, used the second typology to select languages of different
language families and study their acquisition. Slobin suggested that
differences in the encoding of Path were likely to entail differences in the
encoding of other spatial elements such as manner and cause, figure and
ground. He found that indeed the locus of the Path information has a clear
influence on the overall distribution of spatial information in discourse in
that information may be encoded in different linguistic means, or, even,
not encoded at all in discourse. His conclusion was that although all can be
encoded, not all is systematically encoded. It is the systematicity (i.e., “the
ease of expression”) that will ultimately influence what speakers of a
given language tend to select for expression and how speakers acquire that
language. Slobin thus found clear differences between verb-framed and
satellite-framed languages, in terms of the type of information encoded in
the discourse, and the linguistic means used for this encoding.
In studying various languages, Slobin realized that some languages did
not fit neatly within the typological classes provided by Talmy. He
therefore proposed that maybe we are not dealing with two groups of
languages, but rather with a clyne of languages, where some are clearly
verb-framed and others are clearly satellite-framed, but some may be
somewhere in-between. The in-between languages Slobin (2006) names
“equipollent”. In this paper, we will look at one of the proposed so-called
equipollent languages, namely Chinese, and see if we can find supporting
evidence for Slobin’s claim in our data.
In contrast to Slobin, Talmy maintained that Chinese is a satellite-
framed language. He came to this conclusion by analyzing Chinese RVC’s
V1-V2(-V3) (cf. example 1) as consisting of a main verb (V1), followed
by a closed-class set of satellite-like elements (V2 and V3). Indeed, the
semantic contents of the V1 are often of a manner type, and contents of V2
and V3 are very much like the semantic contents of satellites in satellite-
framed languages.
(1) Nei-ge xiao houzi pa-xia-lai le.

That-CL little monkey climb-descend-come.
That monkey climbed down (towards us).
Thus, in this example pa indicates the manner of ascending, i.e., by using

hands and feet to get higher up, and the V2 and V3 indicate Path
information, much like the English satellite down that indicates path.
A problem with Talmy’s analysis is, however, that whereas satellites

cannot be used in any other syntactic function but verb-particle (the
definition of a satellite), the V2 and V3 in Chinese can be found in main
verb functions in other utterances, such as in our example in (2):
(2) Ranhou ta xia-lai le.

Then he descend-come ASP.
Then he came down (towards us).
Otherwise said, the V2 and V3 in Chinese do not have a similar syntactic

function to the English verb-particles, and could just as well be analyzed
as full verbs, as a result of which Chinese becomes a verb-framed
language.
We are of the view that when just studying verb-like and satellite-like
elements in discourse, the decision as to whether Chinese is verb-framed
or satellite-framed is quite an arbitrary one, given that Chinese linguistic
elements are not in any way morphologically marked, hence making it
hard to state unequivocally that they are verbs or satellites. We therefore
feel that one should go beyond the sentence level, and look at the selection
and distribution of spatial information in the discourse as a whole.
In the following, we will attempt to shed some more light on the
typological properties of Chinese. In doing so, we will compare our
findings with further studies by Slobin, and Hickmann and Hendriks
(2005), that show how spatial information is distributed across utterances
in two languages that are considered as clearly verb-framed (French)
versus clearly satellite-framed (English). These differences are quite
systematic in nature, and go beyond the verbal and satellital elements.
Hence, they can bring evidence to bear on the satellite-framedness or verb-
framedness of a language, without one having to decide what is a verb and
what is a satellite.
2. Caused Motion in Chinese, English and French

2.1 Method
This paper uses the methodology developed by Hickmann and

Hendriks (cf. 2005) for the English and French data as reported in this
study, and applies it to new Chinese data. Hickmann and Hendriks used an
elicitation task based on short cartoons showing caused motion events.
Participants in the present study were 12 native speakers of Mandarin
Chinese, English and French, mostly current university students in
26 Chapter One
Beijing, Cambridge and Paris respectively with a mean age around 201.
The caused motion experiment showed 40 cartoons (including 8 distractor
items2) on a laptop, each lasting about 10 seconds and involving an agent
(i.e., Hopi) who was in motion and carried out an action causing the
displacement of some object (e.g. a suitcase, a ball). To give an example:
one of them depicts the scene of Hopi (Agent) rolling (Cause, Manner of
Agent, and Manner of Object) a trunk (Object) down (Path) a snowy hill.
All items represent complex events allowing many different information
components to be encoded simultaneously, making it difficult for subjects
to express all compactly.
Subjects were randomly chosen and invited to participate in the
experiment. They were asked to describe the cartoons to a naïve addressee
who had no visual access to the cartoons and would have to reconstruct the
story depending on their narrations only. In cases where the information
given was considered insufficient, a general question might be asked such
as ‘What happened then?’ Crucially such a general question did not focus
explicitly on cause, manner or path.
2.2. Coding
All speech relevant to the experiment was transcribed by a native
speaker into CHAT format (CHILDES; MacWhinney, B. 2000). The
utterances produced were segmented into ‘clauses’; and each clause had its
own coding line. Note that gerundive-like constructions (Hopi ascends the
hill pushing a ball) and infinitival constructions (e.g. ‘Hopi walked across
the street in order to get to the other side’) were considered clauses in
our transcription, that is, they would all have their own coding line. The
connection between clauses, i.e., coordination and subordination was also
coded. As a result, although generally there is one and only one target
response for a given item, a matrix clause and its embedded clauses could
comprise two or three coding lines, each of them coded as part of the
1
The data analyzed below constitutes a subset of a large ongoing project involving
several languages including French, English, and German, seven age groups of
speakers (adults, three- to ten-year-olds); and several tasks including both
productivity and comprehension activities examining spatial reference,
representation and expression. Similar standardization and procedure have been
followed in data collection, material design, data transcription and coding across
languages.
2
The distractor items were designed to conceal the real goal of the experiment
from the subjects. They were also concerned with motion (e.g. a red ball collides
with a stack of skittles and the skittles fall down).
target. The target was selected according to previously established criteria.

i.e., the target clause was always the one that is semantically richer (i.e.
encoding more information components), or pertinent to Path expression
or Agent’s action. The introduction and application of these coding criteria
led to high inter-judge reliability between coders in all three languages
involved.
As mentioned earlier, the caused motion cartoons are designed such
that an Agent causes (pushing or pulling) a Figure to move (rolling or
sliding) along different Paths (up, down, into and across). The multiple
information components inherent in these events fall into six major
categories:
(1) CAUSE (C): the causal relation between A (agent) and O (object);
applicable to al items.
(2) A-ACTION (A): Agent’s action causing O’s motion; i.e. push or pull.
(3) O-PATH (P): Object’s path of motion (same as A-path); i.e. up, down,
into and across.
(4) A-PATH (P): Agent’s path of motion (same as O-path); i.e. up, down,
into and across.
(5) O-MANNER (OM): Object’s manner of motion; i.e. roll or slide.
(6) A-MANNER (AM): Agent’s manner of motion; i.e. walk (applicable
to all items).
All this information was systematically coded for each clause. Note that
Hickmann and Hendriks decided that much of the spatial information can
be expressed outside the verb and its satellites (as defined by Talmy), and
that therefore information occurring in other elements should also be taken
into account. Hence, information occurring in satellites, nouns (the
jogger), subordinate clauses (swimming), etc., is coded under the label
“other”, thereby parting from the initial split verb / satellite.
3. Results
The results presented below focus on the expression of caused motion
in Chinese native adults and compare them with findings in English and
French (Hickmann and Hendriks, 2008). In our analysis, the above
mentioned components (i.e., Cause, Manner, Path, and Agent’s action)
were further examined with respect to three aspects: the selection of
information components; the devices encoding Cause, Manner and Path of
motion; and the density of information overall; Density in our analysis was
defined as the number of different components encoded in one utterance,
28 Chapter One
which could vary from none to three or more than three. Examples are
given below.
(3)
NONE
a. He goes there with his ball
ONE
b. Hopi shang [Path-vertical] fangzi ding. (‘Hopi ascends the roof’.)
TWO
c. Hopi tui [Cause+Action] liwu. (‘Hopi pushes the present’.)
d. Il fait rouler [Cause+O-Manner] le ballon sur la colline. (‘He makes
the ball roll’)
THREE
e. He rolls [Cause+O-Manner] the tyre into [Path-boundary] the cave.
f. Yige Hopi ba yige yingerche la-guo [Cause+Action+Path-boundary]
le jie [c].
(Hopi pulls crosses a pram the street.)
MORE
g. Zhege Hopi shijin de la [Cause+Action] zhe xiangzi cong [Path-
source] shanding zou-dao [A-manner+Path-goal] le shanpo xia.
(Hopi walks from the top of the hill to the foot of the hill pushing a trunk
with effort.)
Selection of components refers to the specific information components

that were chosen by the subject to express in utterance (called Focus in
Hickmann and Hendriks 2008). It usually comprises various combinations
of the above-mentioned six major components (categorized into C, A, M,
P). An aspect closely associated with this question is the distribution of
selected components across utterance (i.e. devices used to encode
components). Device in our analysis concerns Verbs versus Other devices
(called Locus in Hickmann and Hendriks 2008). The former refers to an
inflected verb or a verbal compound (i.e. RVC) in main or independent
clauses. The latter includes various linguistic means such as particles,
prepositions, adverbials in main clauses, verbs in subordinate clauses, and
also particles, prepositions and adverbials in subordinate clauses.
3.1. The Selection of Information Components

Figure 1 (cf. appendix) shows the selection of information components
in the three languages. As a key information component, Cause is present
in all test items of the experiment; and it is highly frequently expressed by
subjects in all three languages compared (Chinese 96%, English 98%,

French 99%). Similarly, Path is present in more than 85% of all items in
all three languages. The information that is least expressed, again in all
three languages, is Manner information, both regarding the Agent
(walking) and the Object (rolling or sliding). In the competition between
different types of information to be expressed with respect to the
elicitation material, there seems to be a language-independent preference
for referring to Cause > Path > Agent Action > Manner. Note that these
levels of expression differ substantially from the natural occurrence of
such information in the three languages. Because of the experimental set-
up, however, speakers were aware of the need to provide as much
information as possible.
3.2. Devices Used to Express the Selected Information

Although the Cause component is expressed equally frequently and
systematically across all three languages, a closer look at the data shows
that it is expressed via very different devices. As shown in Figure 2 in the
Appendix, unlike in English, the Cause component is relatively evenly
encoded in Verb and Other devices in both Chinese and French.
In French, the Cause component is encoded in verbs (i.e. Example 4a)
and specific causative constructions (i.e. Example 4b) while in English
predominantly verbs are used (i.e. Example 4c). In Chinese, we found that
Cause is expressed either by verbal compounds (i.e. RVC, 32%) in the
distinctive ba construction (Example 4d) or via transitive verbs (58%) in
gerundive-like ‘zhe’ clauses subordinated to a matrix clause (Example 4e).
(4)
French
a. Jean roule la balle. ( John rolls the ball.)
b. Il fait rouler la balle. (He makes the ball roll.)
English
c. John rolls the ball up the hill.
Chinese
d. Ta ba qiu gun-xia-qu. (‘He BA the ball roll-descend-go.)
e. Hopi gun zhe qiu xia shan. (‘Hopi descends the hill rolling the ball’)
The RVC (Resultative Verbal Compound) is a construction in Chinese,

which is typically composed of two verbs with the second one signaling
some result of the action or process conveyed by the first element (Li &
Thompson 1981, 55). The RVCs involved in our data are classed as
30 Chapter One
‘directional RVCs’, in which V1 is a verb of action causing the direct

object to undergo displacement (i.e. Agent’s action: push / pull / roll); and
V2 indicates the result of the action performed, namely, the direction (UP /
DOWN / ACROSS/ INTO) in our case. By this is meant that the RVC acts
here as a compound causative form via which the Cause component is
expressed. Our Chinese data also showed that most RVC forms are used in
conjunction with the ba construction, a construction stressing the
affectedness of the object and highlighting the meaning of ‘disposal’,
namely, how an entity is handled, manipulated, dealt with, or disposed of
(see, for an instance, Wang 1985, Lu 1980, Ma 1985, Li & Thompson
1981). Seen in this light, the adoption of the ba construction mainly
functions here to further strengthen the causality encoded in the RVC.
Alternatively, the Cause component is expressed in Chinese in
gerundive-like constructions (e.g. ‘rolling the ball’ in Example 2e above).
In this case, a complex clause is usually used with Cause expressed in
transitive verbs in the embedded ‘zhe’ clause. Note that contrary to the use
of the ba construction where Cause is expressed in the Verb, the adoption
of a complex clause corresponds to the encoding of Cause in Other
devices, a feature that distinguishes Chinese from Satellite-framed
languages like English and patterns it with Verb-framed languages like
French.
Regarding the other major information components in Verb and Other
devices, Figure 3 shows that English verbs predominantly express Agent
Action. In contrast, both Chinese and French verbs denote not only Agent
Action and Manner, but also the Path component in predominating
proportions. Note that compared to situations in which French verbs
typically indicate only one type of information (i.e. Path) and in which
English typically indicates two types of information (Cause and Agent
Action), Chinese RVCs allow multiple information components to be
expressed simultaneously in the verb. For example, Path is typically
expressed in conjunction with either Agent Action (A+P) or Manner
(M+P) as shown in Example 5 below.
(5)
a. Hopi ba yingerche cong he nabian la guo [A+P] xiaohe.
(Hopi ba the pram pull-across the river from the other side.)
b. Hopi gun zhe qiu yizhi gun dao [M+P] shan xia.
(Hopi rolls-arrive the bottom of the hill, rolling the ball all the way.)
Further, Types of Path expressed in Chinese RVCs differ in semantic

value from the Path information encoded in Other devices. The former
mainly include up, down, across and into (e.g. ‘across’ in Example 5a)
while the latter typically indicate source, goal and deixis of motion (e.g.
‘from’ in Example 5a).
With respect to the selection of information components in Other
devices, Figure 4 demonstrates that English typically encodes Path alone
outside the Verb while in both Chinese and French, the Agent’s Action
can be expressed, as can Path and Manner information. Particularly, Agent
Action becomes the most frequently encoded component outside the Verb
in Chinese via the gerundive-like embedded ‘zhe’ clause (e.g. ‘rolling the
ball’ in Example 5b above).
3.3. The Density of Information in Chinese, English, and French

As shown in Figure 5, overall, the predominating proportions of
utterances in all three languages encode three or more than three
information components (Chinese 98%, English 92%, French 82%), but
the density of information at the locus of Verb or Other devices varies
with the language. English Verbs overwhelmingly encode two
components. In comparison, the proportions of French verbs expressing
only one component and those expressing two components are comparable
(45% & 53% respectively) to each other. Chinese verbs, on the other hand,
are distinguished from both English and French with the greatest density:
as many as 38% of verbs contain up to three components in the RVC form
(e.g. Example 1f). Note that Chinese verbs also show the greatest variety
in terms of information density, namely, the number of information
components encoded in the Verb ranges from one to three, depending on
whether the V2 in the RVC is used as a full verb or a complete RVC form
is adopted.
As regards the density of information at the locus of Other devices, it
can be seen from Figure 6 that English, again, demonstrates a clear pattern
of encoding only one information component in Other devices, mostly
verb-particles and prepositions (e.g. Example 3e). Note that combinations
of particles and prepositions are frequent and often provide different
subcomponents of the same semantic information type. For example,
verticality, source and goal of motion can be jointly encoded in Other
devices in English.
(6) Hopi pushes it up from the bottom to the top of the hill.
On the other hand, the information density in Chinese and French Other
devices may vary from none to more than three components, mainly
32 Chapter One
depending on the specific construction adopted. For instance, in Chinese,

there is a high proportion of zero density in Other devices because all
major information can be readily expressed in RVCs as shown in Example
7a. The case of higher density in the Other devices frequently occurs when
‘zhe’ embedded clauses are used (e.g. Example 7b).
(7) a. Hopi ba qiu tui xia shan.

(‘Hopi ba the ball push-descend the hill’)
b. Hopi gun zhe qiu cong shan shang xia lai.
(‘Hopi descended the hill from the top [Path-source] rolling
[Cause+O-manner] the ball’).
3.4. Summary of the Results

In terms of utterance density, Chinese contains a greater number of
information components than both English and French. An investigation
of the information selection reveals that the Cause component is highly
frequent in all three languages compared, while Manner is least frequently
expressed. Overall, the Agent Action and Path information are slightly
more frequently expressed in Chinese and English than in French. As
regards the devices employed to encode the information components,
English demonstrates a clear-cut pattern of placing the components Cause
and Agent Action together in verbs, and the Path component in Other
devices. In contrast, French verbs usually encode one or two components
with Path information most frequently expressed. Chinese differs from
both. First of all, the Resultative Verbal Compound (RVC) allows for
maximally 3 components to be expressed compactly, such that Cause,
Action and Path can be encoded within the main verb. Alternatively both
Cause and Action can be expressed in the gerundive-like zhe clause, viz,
in Other devices. Further, the distribution of information in English seems
to be quite homogenous within and across subjects. Chinese and French,
however, tend to distribute motion components across devices with more
variety, though Path is typically found in verbs and Agent Action in other
elements.
4. Discussion and Concluding Remarks

Our results reveal that Chinese does not fully pattern with either
English or French in the expression of caused motion. On the one hand, it
resembles English and shows features of satellite-framed languages in that
Cause and Agent Action can be jointly expressed in the Verb (e.g.. with
use of the ba construction) whilst Path is expressed outside the verb; on

the other, it functions in a similar way to French, demonstrating
characteristics of verb-framed languages in that Cause and Action can be
alternatively encoded in subordinated clauses and Path in the Verb (the
embedded ‘zhe’ clause). The hybrid profile that Chinese demonstrates is
closely associated with its typological features as a serial verb language.
We can conclude that Chinese can indeed be classified as an equipollent
language, as previously suggested by Slobin. Generally, our data shows
that typological factors affect what information speakers express in verb
and other devices and how they organize this information in the discourse
as a whole.
References
Hickmann, M., & Hendriks, H. 2005. “Children’s expression of caused
motion in French and English.” Paper presented at the IASCL
conference, July: Berlin, Germany.
Hickmann, M., and Hendriks, H. 2008. “Cause, Manner and Path of
Motion across Child Languages: Evidence from French and English.”
Poster presented at the IASCL XI Conference, Edinburgh, July.
Li, C.N., & Thompson, S.A. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A functional
Reference Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lu, S. X. (Ed.) 1980. Xiandai Hanyu Babai Ci (The Eight Hundred Words
in Modern Chinese). Beijing: Commercial Publishing House.
Ma, Z. 2004. Xiandai hanyu xuci yanjiu fangfalun (Remarks on the Study
of Functional Words in Modern Chinese). Beijig: Commercial
Publishing House.
MacWhinney, B. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk.
Vol 2: The Database. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Slobin, D. 2000. Verbalized events: a dynamic approach to linguistic
determinism. In Evidence for Linguistic Relativity, edited by S.
Niemeyer and R. Dirven, 107-138. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
—. 2003. The many ways to search for a frog. In Relating Events in
Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, edited by S.
Strömqvist and L. Verhoeven, 219-257. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
—. 2006. What makes manner of motion salient? Explorations in linguistic
typology, discourse and cognition. In Space in Languages: Linguistic
Systems and Cognitive Categories, edited by M. Hickmann and S.
Robert, 59-81. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
34 Chapter One
Talmy, L. 1975. Semantics and syntax of motion. In Syntax and Semantics

4, edited by J. Kimball, 181-238. New York: Academic Press.
—. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In
Language Typology and Syntactic Field Work, vol. 3, edited by T.
Shopen, S. Anderson, T. Givón, E. Keenan and S. Thompson, 57-149.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
—. 2000. Towards a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wang, L. 1985. Zhongguo Xiandai Yufa (The Modern Chinese Grammar).
Beijing: Commercial Publishing House.
Appendices
Figure 1: The overall expression of information components in

Chinese, English and French

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CHAPTER TWO
THE MANY WAYS TO BE LOCATED IN FRENCH

AND SERBIAN: THE ROLE OF FICTIVE MOTION
IN THE EXPRESSION OF STATIC LOCATION
DEJAN STOSIC AND LAURE SARDA
Abstract
The general aim of this paper is to explore different ways of expressing
static location in French and Serbian. Both languages use three main types
of locative predicates: neutral verbs (e.g. FR. être ‘to be’), posture verbs
(e.g. ENG. to sit, to lie, to stand) and verbs expressing fictive motion, i.e.
verbs whose reference is to motion but which actually describe static
situations (e.g. The road descends towards the coast) (Talmy 2000). In this
study, based on a large contrastive corpus of expressions of static location
in French and Serbian novels, we compare the role that these different
types of locative predicates play in each language. We point out that
Serbian uses posture verbs much more extensively by locating both
animate and inanimate Figures, and that the limited use of posture verbs in
French (with only animate Figures) makes fictive motion more salient.
Finally, we show how such cross-linguistic differences in attention to
fictive motion affect human spatial cognition.
Our analysis adopts the framework of Talmy’s typology, which
opposes Verb-framed languages (e.g. French, Turkish) to Satellite-framed
languages (e.g. Serbian, English) (cf. Talmy 2000) and discusses the
validity of the distinction between “high-manner-salient” and “low-
manner-salient” languages for the domain of static location (cf. Slobin
2004). By assuming that posture verbs are static equivalents of manner of
motion verbs (e.g. to run, to walk)—as suggested by M. Lemmens (2002a,
2002b, 2005)—we argue that, in the domain of static location (as well as in
the domain of motion), Satellite-framed languages (e.g. Serbian) pay more
attention to the expression of manner than Verb-framed languages (e.g.
French).
40 Chapter Two
Introduction
In this paper, we discuss different ways of expressing static location in
French and Serbian. Both languages use several types of locative
predicates as well as many kinds of syntactic constructions to describe
static spatial relationships. We will focus particularly on the semantic
nature of verbal components in static spatial descriptions and will compare
the importance of different types of locative predicates in the expression of
static space in French and Serbian. Section 1 presents an inventory of
locative predicates across languages. In section 2, we define the framework
adopted in this study. Next, we discuss different types of locative
predicates in French and Serbian and examine, on the basis of contrastive
data, their importance in the expression of static location in each of the
two languages. This comparison reveals some interesting typological
differences between two languages (sections 3.1. and 3.2.). In the last part
of the article, we tackle the issue of the importance of fictive motion in
expressing static location in French and Serbian and show that the limited
use of posture verbs in French makes fictive motion more salient. Finally,
we show that such cross-linguistic differences in attention to fictive
motion can affect human spatial cognition (sections 3.3. and 4).
1. Many ways to be located across languages:

different types of locative predicates
The most exhaustive inventory of locative predicates across languages
can be found in studies on Basic Locative Constructions. For example, this
has been a central topic in much research at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen) (see MPI Annual Reports 1998, 1999,
2001), as well as in (Newman (ed.) 2002; Lemmens 2002a, b, 2005;
Kopecka 2004; Grinevald 2006; Ameka and Levinson (eds) 2007;
Levinson and Wilkins (eds) 2006). A Basic Locative Construction is “the
typical construction selected by speakers of a language to answer a where-
question like ‘Where is the cup?’” (MPI Annual Report 1998, ch. 7).
Relevant research is based on the idea that one can identify a small set of
Basic Locative Constructions across languages and argues that all
languages fall into one of four types of constructions:
The Many Ways to be Located in French and Serbian 41
Typology of locative predication (MPI Annual Report, 1999: 63)
Type 0: No verb in basic locative construction (e.g. Saliba,

Austronesian)
1. something like “cup on the table”
Type I: Single locative verb

Ia: Copula (e.g. English, Tamil)
Ib: Locative (+ Existential) verb (e.g. Japanese, Yukatek)
2. “The cup is on the table.” (ENG)
Type II: Postural verbs (3-6 verbs) (e.g. Dutch, Arrernte)

3. De fles staat op de tafel (DUTCH) (MPI AR: 68)
the bottle stands on the table
“The bottle is on the table.”
Type III: Positional verbs (12-100 dispositional verbs) (e.g. Tzeltat,

Zapotec)
4. metzel-Ø ta tz’amal te’ xawin (TZELTAL)

lying on its side PREP bench ART cat (Grinevald 2006)
“The cat is lying (on its side) on the bench.”
A particularly interesting aspect of this typology for our purposes is the

distinction between three main types of locative predicates present across
languages: first, copula or general neutral locative verbs, second posture
verbs and third positional verbs, as shown in examples (1) to (4). In this
study, we will not consider French and Serbian as belonging to one of
these types with respect to their Basic Locative Construction. Instead, our
aim is to explore the variability of locative constructions that can appear
within a given language. More precisely, we discuss the role and the
importance of different types of locative predicates that can be used in
French and Serbian in the expression of static spatial relationships. It is
well known that in a large majority of languages, other constructions are
used in addition to the locative predicates mentioned above in descriptions
of static location. One such construction is the passive (or resultative)
construction, as shown in (5).
42 Chapter Two
5. SR Torbe su okaþene na zidu.
FR Les sacs sont accrochés au mur.
ENG The bags are hanging from the wall.
Another possibility is to use fictive motion, as shown in example (6).
6. SR Put ide duž obale.
FR La route longe la côte.
ENG The road runs along the coast.
The importance of fictive motion in expressing static location has not been
studied extensively and not at all from a crosslinguistic or typological
perspective (see, however, Matsumoto 1996; Rojo and Valenzuela 2003).
In this article, we attempt to define the importance of fictive motion in the
expression of static location in French and Serbian.
2. Comparing French and Serbian in the framework

of Talmy’s typology (Talmy 2000)
It is particularly interesting to compare French and Serbian, because
they are representatives of two different groups of languages according to
Talmy’s typology, which we adopt here. As is well known, (Talmy 2000)
opposes Verb-framed languages (VL) (such as French, Turkish, Japanese,
Basque and Hebrew) to Satellite-framed languages (SL) (such as Serbian,
English, Dutch, Finnish and Hungarian) (cf. Talmy 2000; Slobin 2004).
This typological distinction reflects two ways to encode change of
location, i.e. the “path of motion” (cf. Slobin 2003). The path is one of the
essential components of a motion event. In Verb-framed languages, the
path of motion is preferentially encoded by the verb. In Satellite-framed
languages, in contrast, the path component is mainly encoded by various
particles or “satellites” associated with the verb, such as prepositions,
prefixes, postpositions, etc. Examples (7) and (8) illustrate this opposition.
7. FR Jean est entré dans la maison. (VL)

“John entered the house”
8. ENG John went into the house. (SL)
This crucial difference in coding the path of motion is accompanied by

another interesting difference: the manner of motion, also a very important
component of a motion event, is highly codable in Satellite-framed
languages, but not in Verb-framed languages.
9. ENG John ran into the house. (SL)

10. FR Jean est entré dans la maison en courant. (VL)
“John entered the house by running.”
In Satellite-framed languages, the encoding of manner poses no problems

because manner can be expressed by the verb (for instance go in or run
in), see example (9). In Verb-framed languages, the verb is not available
because it must encode the path. As a consequence, the manner of motion
is generally optional information, as in the French sentence (10). This
suggests that the manner of motion is linguistically and cognitively much
more salient in Satellite-framed languages than in Verb-framed languages.
Thus, in the expression of motion, one can distinguish between “high-
manner-salient” and “low-manner-salient” languages.
This distinction between Verb-framed and Satellite-framed languages
raises several interesting questions. First, does this distinction extend to
the domain of static location? If so, how is manner expressed by static
location? Does the reference to the manner of location in the static domain
occur more frequently in Satellite-framed languages or in Verb-framed
languages? In order to answer these questions, we first present an
inventory of locative predicates in French and Serbian, then compare the
importance of each type of predicate in the expression of static spatial
scenes in the two languages. The comparison is based on a contrastive
corpus of expressions of static locations in French and Serbian novels
(detailed references are listed at the end of the paper).
This work is part of the larger Location verb project which focuses on
location and posture verbs in many languages and which tries to draw a
parallel between motion and location. The Location verb project1 is an
essential complement to the existing typological research on motion verbs
in the framework of Talmy’s typology.
1
The Location verb project is supported by the French Ministry of Research and is
managed by M. Lemmens (University of Lille III). For more details about project
see (Lemmens 2005).
44 Chapter Two
3. Locative predicates in French and Serbian

In French and Serbian, three main types of locative predicates
contribute to the expression of static location: neutral verbs, posture verbs
and verbs describing fictive motion. In the following, we compare the role
that these different types of locative predicates play in each language.
3.1. Neutral verbs

Neutral verbs are widely used in French and Serbian. They are listed in
Table 1. We call them neutral because they have no particular semantics,
and they often behave as locative or existential copula.
Neutral location verbs

French Serbian English
être biti ‘be’
se trouver nalaziti se ‘be located’
rester ostati ‘stay’
il y a ima ‘there is’
Table 1. Neutral location verbs in French and Serbian
We wish to stress that in both languages, the use of these predicates is

equally widespread and that they are capable of expressing location of
both animate and inanimate Figures, as can be seen in examples (11) and
(12). We will use the term “Figure” for the entity to be located, and the
term “Ground” for the reference entity, following Talmy’s terminology
(2000).
11. SR Ana / moja omiljena stolica je u kuhinji.

12. FR Anne / ma chaise préférée est dans la cuisine.
“Anne / my favorite chair is in the kitchen”
3.2. Posture verbs

Almost all languages have a small set of verbs expressing cardinal
positions of the human body: sit, lie, stand as well as kneel, squat.
Posture verbs
French Serbian English
être debout stajati ‘stand’
être assis sedeti ‘be sitting’
être couché ležati ‘be lying’
être accroupi þuþati ‘squat’
être agenouillé kleþati ‘kneel’
Table 2. Posture verbs in French and Serbian
The main use of these verbs is to describe situations in which some

animate Figure (human or animal) is ‘sitting’, ‘standing’, ‘lying’,
‘hanging’, and so on. They reflect the sensitivity of languages to the
orientation and disposition of the Figure for expressing its location. As
shown in examples (13) and (14), both French and Serbian employ
cardinal posture verbs to localize animate entities:
13. SR Putnici su stajali u holu.

”the passengers were standing in the hall”
14. FR Le chien est assis devant la maison.
“the dog is sitting in front of the house”
However, we note a contrast between the two languages for expressing

the localization of inanimate entities. Indeed, several studies on posture
verbs have shown (see Newman (ed.) 2002; Lemmens 2002a, 2002b;
Grinevald 2006; Ameka and Levinson (eds) 2007; Levinson and Wilkins
(eds) 2006), that many languages have significantly extended or even
grammaticalized the use and the meaning of posture verbs (e.g. DUTCH:
Er zit geen bier meer in het vat. “there sits no more beer in the barrel”; In
elk kind zit een leraar. “in every child sits a teacher”—see Lemmens
2002a). These verbs have become basic location verbs for describing the
location of any entity, animate or inanimate. They also have a wide range
of metaphorical and grammatical uses across languages. In the following,
we take a closer look at the possibilities of using posture verbs in French
and Serbian.
First, French allows a limited use of posture verbs être debout ‘to
stand’, être assis “to sit” et être couché “to lie”, since only animate
Figures can occur with this type of verb. The combination with inanimate
Figures is not allowed in French, as seen in these examples:
46 Chapter Two
15. FR *La lampe est debout sur la table.

(La lampe est/se trouve sur la table)
“the lamp is standing on the table”
16. FR *Le livre était couché sur la table.
(Le livre était sur la table)
“the book was lying on the table”
Moreover, (Lemmens 2005) argues that French often uses neutral verbs
like être ‘to be’ or se trouver ‘to be located’, even when referring to
human beings in one of the three cardinal positions (be sitting, standing or
lying).
In Serbian, the use of posture verbs is quite different. Indeed, Serbian
uses posture verbs for both animate and inanimate Figures, as we can see
in example (17). Moreover, Serbian posture verbs have acquired many
metaphorical, abstract and idiomatic uses.
17. SR Marija / moja torba je stajala u holu.

”Mary / my bag was standing in the hall”
We note that Serbian posture verbs do not all have the same behavior:
unlike the other posture verbs, sedeti ‘be sitting’ only occurs with animate
Figures, as exemplified in (18).
18. SR Marija / *moja torba je sedela u dvorištu.

”Mary / my bag was sitting in the hall”
3.2.1. Corpus analysis
We now take a look at the data. As will be discussed below, the data
confirm the observations made above and lead to several other interesting
findings. We performed a bidirectional analysis of French and Serbian
novels by observing how each type of locative predicate is translated in the
target language. The size and the composition of the corpus are given in
Table 3.
Verb type FRENCH SERBIAN

or Number Number of Number of
Number of
Verb of translated translated
examples
meaning examples examples examples
Neutral verbs Ø Ø 90 89
Posture verbs 176 160 247 245
Change of 378 167 93 91
posture V
Fictive motion 98 86 19 19
Grand Total 652 413 449 445
Table 3. The Size and the Composition of the corpus
The translations from French to Serbian show that, with animate

Figures, French posture verbs are most often translated in Serbian by
posture verbs. By contrast, Serbian posture verbs are not always translated
by posture verbs in French, because Serbian allows the use of posture
verbs with inanimate Figures, whereas French generally does not. As we
will see, we found some extensions of the uses of the French verb gésir
(‘to lie’, as ‘to lie in the grave’) with inanimate Figures.
Type of Posture verbs (SERBIAN)
predicate
in
Animate Figures Inanimate Figures
FRENCH
translation
Posture 56 (19) 12,5 (24)
Verbs % %
Neutral 17 (20) 30 (25)
Verbs % %
48 Chapter Two
Change of 13 (21) Ø
posture V %
Fictive 0,5 10 (26)
motion % %
Other 9 (22) 37,5 (27)
verbs % %
Omission 4,5 (23) 10
% %
Table 4. Translation of Serbian posture verbs in French
Table 4. shows that Serbian posture verbs appearing with animate Figures
are translated in 56 % of cases by posture verbs, in 17 % of cases by
neutral verbs and in 13 % of cases by verbs of movement, i.e. by verbs of
change of posture (e.g. sit, lie). Some of these possibilities are illustrated
by examples from (19) to (23).
19. SR Ponajviše su sedeli ili ležali, nemi i bez pokreta. (Andriü,

Prokleta avlija: 46)
FR Le plus souvent, ils étaient assis ou couchés, muets et
immobiles. (p.51)
“…they were sitting or lying…”
20. SR Jednog jutra stajao sam pored ogledala i þešljao se. (Andriü,
Jelena: 269)
“… I was standing in front of the mirror…”
FR Par un matin tout ensoleillé, j'étais devant ma glace et je me
coiffais, quand il me sembla tout à coup voir… (p. 223)
… I was in front of the mirror…’
21. SR Ona je, kao gost, u þelu sedela i þekala da, što se iznese, jede,
pije. (Stankoviü: 83)
“… she was sitting at the end of the table…”
FR Telle une invitée, elle s'asseyait au haut bout de la table et

attendait qu'on serve les plats et qu'on se mette à manger, à
boire. (p. 97)
“… she used to sit at the end of the table…”
22. SR Sedeo je i glodao šestolisni tropek... (Paviü: 26)
FR Il était déjà attablé et en train de ronger un biscuit hexapétale,
lorsqu'une créature apparut… (p. 27)
“he was already sitting at the table eating a biscuit…”
23. SR Postave. ýekaju. Naroþito Mladen stoji, neüe ni da sedne za
sofru a kamoli da jede. (Stankoviü : 84)
FR Mladen, en particulier, n'acceptait même pas de s'attabler, et
encore moins de commencer à manger. (p. 99)
“Mladen, particularly, didn’t even accept to sit at the table,
much less so to start eating.”
These results also confirm the claim that French often uses neutral
verbs even when referring to human beings in one of the three cardinal
positions: in 17 % of cases the French translator has preferred to use a
neutral verb such as rester “stay”, se tenir ”to stay, to remain”, être ”to
be”, il y a ”there is”, rather than to use a posture verb. As suggested by
(Lemmens 2005), “manner of being positioned in space is not a notion that
French speakers care to express, even for human posture”.
When occurring with inanimate Figures, Serbian posture verbs are
most often translated by neutral verbs—in 30 % of cases—and in very few
cases by the French posture verb gésir ‘to lie’ (as ‘to lie in the grave’).
Finally, a very interesting finding is that 10 % of situations described by
posture verbs in Serbian are expressed as fictive motion in French, see
example (26). We present a detailed analysis of this possibility in the
following. Note also the presence of other lexical items in French
translations (38 %), see example (27), as well as many cases of omission
(10 %).
24. SR U tankom pepelu ležao je baþen crni pekarski nož, krvav do

dršaka. (Andriü, Anikina vremena: 91)
FR Dans la cendre légère gisait le couteau noir du boulanger,
ensanglanté jusqu'à la poignée. (p. 88)
“in the ashes, was lying a black knife …”
50 Chapter Two
25. SR Gore u sobi, gori mu sveüa i leže otvoreni tevteri (…).

(Stankoviü: 71)
“… the accounting books were lying wide open…”
FR Là-haut, dans sa chambre, une bougie brûlait et les livres de
comptes (…) étaient grands ouverts… (p. 81)
“… the accounting books were wide open… “
26. SR Pop-Vujadinova sudbina je stajala pred njim prosta a
neobjašnjiva: neveselo dete, usamljen mladiü, nesreüan þovek.
(Andriü, Anikina vremena: 23)
“his destiny was standing in front of him …”
FR Son destin se dressait devant lui, simple et imprévisible: un
enfant triste, un jeune homme solitaire, un homme malheureux.
(p. 20)
“his destiny was standing / “rising” in front of him”
27. SR Baþena hartija i raskidan staniol leže u travi i belasaju se
poslednjim naporom u sumraku. (Andriü, Anikina vremena:
16)
‘papers and leaves are lying/scattered on the grass…’
FR Les papiers jetés et les feuilles d'étain déchirées traînaient
dans l'herbe, lançant un dernier éclat dans le crépuscule. (p. 14)
‘papers and leaves were lying/scattered on the grass…’
3.2.2. Drawing a parallel between motion and location:

“high-manner-salient” vs. “low-manner-salient” languages
The comparison above shows that an extensive use of posture verbs in

Serbian allows the speaker to pay more attention to the manner in which
the Figure is positioned in space when localizing it. According to
(Lemmens 2002a, 2002b), posture verbs can be considered as static
equivalents of manner of motion verbs.
Motion Static location

manner of motion manner of location
run, jump, swim, walk stand, sit, lie, hang
If one assumes that posture verbs are static equivalents of manner of

motion verbs, then Serbian, as a representative of Satellite-framed
languages, seems to be more ‘manner salient’ than French, which makes
limited use of posture verbs. It thus appears that, in the domain of static
location (as well as in the domain of motion), Satellite-framed languages
pay more attention to the expression of manner than Verb-framed

languages. It also appears that the distinction between “high-manner-
salient” and “low-manner-salient” languages proposed for the domain of
motion (Slobin 2004) can be applied to the domain of static location.
3.3. Fictive motion

We have shown that verbs expressing “fictive motion” (also called
abstract or subjective motion) can serve to express static location in
French and Serbian. According to Talmy’s definition, verbs expressing
fictive motion are verbs whose basic reference is to motion, but which
actually describe stationary situations (Talmy 2000: vol. I: ch. 2).
28. The road descends towards the coast.

29. That mountain range goes from Canada to Mexico (Talmy
2000: vol. I: 104)
In example (28), the scene is static (the road does not move), but the
motion verb to descend is used for describing it. In such a situation, there
is a mental representation of some entity moving along or over the
configuration of the Ground (the fictively moving entity can be imagined
as being an observer, or the focus of one’s attention or the object itself). In
examples (28) and (29), the observer mentally imagines something moving
along the road or along the mountain range. Many factors can motivate
this kind of conceptualization of static scenes, but this is not our concern
here. Fictive motion considered as a cognitive and widespread linguistic
phenomenon, has been studied by several authors, see in particular (Talmy
1996, 2000: vol. 1: ch. 2; Matlock 2004a, b; Matlock and Richardson
2004; Langacker 1986, 2000; Matsumoto 1996; Rojo and Valenzuela
2003). However, the very importance of fictive motion in the expression
of static location across languages has not been studied. Up to now, there
are no studies that try to define cross-linguistically the place of fictive
motion in the expression of static scenes. We believe that verbs expressing
fictive motion are worth studying in comparison with other types of
locative predicates. T. Matlock (2004a) uses the term fictive motion
construction for sentences including fictive motion and suggests that “it
may be appropriate to treat it as a subset of a more basic construction”.
Our work here is an attempt to define the place of fictive motion among
the other ways of expressing static location in French and Serbian.
52 Chapter Two
L. Talmy (2000: vol. I: ch. 2) distinguishes many kinds of fictive

motion with regard to various features2. In this paper, we are concerned
with only three of them: advent paths, coextension paths and frame
relative paths. For this investigation, we thus considered a small set of
verbs which express motion (e.g. descendre, longer), change of posture or
shape (se dresser, s’allonger, s’étendre) or verbs of appearance (e.g.
apparaître, surgir) and which are capable of describing fictive motion.
Table 5 shows a sample of the verbs we studied in both French and
Serbian. In the same table, we indicate certain morphological, temporal
and aspectual properties of verb forms expressing fictive motion. Further
grammatical and semantic properties of fictive motion constructions are
discussed in (Matlock 2004a).
Verb Sample of studied

Lang. Tense / Aspect Person
type verbs
descendre ‘go down’, 3th
longer ‘go along’, person
present,
FR passer ‘pass’, grimper singular
imparfait
motion ‘climb’, monter ‘go or
up’, zigzaguer ‘zigzag’ plural
iüi ‘go’, penjati se
imperfective
SR ‘climb’, spuštati se
aspect
‘come down’,
change of se dresser ‘stand up’,
posture s’élever ‘rise up’, present,
FR
/shape s’allonger ‘strech out’, imparfait
s’étendre ‘extend’,
2
(Talmy 2000: vol. I: ch. 2) distinguishes the following types of fictive motion:
Orientation Paths (e.g. I/The arrow on the signpost pointed toward/away
from/into/past the town.), Radiation Paths (e.g. The sun is shining into the
cave/onto the back wall of the cave.), Shadow Paths (e.g. The pillar’s shadow fell
onto/against the wall.), Sensory Paths (e.g. I can hear/smell him all the way from
where I’m standing.), Pattern Paths (e.g. As I painted the ceiling, (a line of) paint
spots slowly progressed across the floor.), Frame Relative Motion (e.g. I sat in the
car and watched the scenery rush past me. or I was walking through the woods and
this branch that was sticking out hit me.), Advent Paths: a) Site arrival (e.g. The
beam leans/tilts away from the wall. – active verb form or Termite mounds are
scattered/strewn/spread/distributed all over the plain. – passive verb form), b) Site
manifestation (e.g. This rock formation occurs/appears/shows up near volcanoes.),
Access Paths (e.g. The bakery is across the street from the bank.), Coextension
Paths (e.g. The fence goes/zigzags/descends from the plateau to the valley.).
dizati se ‘rise’,
protezati se ‘extend’, imperfective
SR
izdizati se ‘rise up’, aspect
širiti se ‘be spreading’
apparaître ‘appear’, perfect, preterit,
FR surgir ‘arise’, se (present,
dresser ‘stand up’ imparfait)
appearan
ce perfective
pojaviti se ‘appaer’, aspect,
SR
iskrsnuti ‘arise’ (imperfective
aspect)
Table 5. Sample of fictive motion verbs
Our corpus based study shows that fictive motion sentences from one
language are generally translated by fictive motion sentences in the other,
see examples (30) and (31).
Type of predicate in Fictive motion

translation FR—SR SR-FR
Fictive motion 70 % (30) 89 % (31)
Neutral Verbs 10 % (32) Ø
Posture Verbs 5% (33) Ø
Other verbs 5% Ø
Omission 10 % 11 %
Table 6. Translation of fictive motion descriptions from French to Serbian
and vice versa
30. FR Dehors, la route, comme tu sais, s'allonge tout droit entre

deux collines, tantôt montant, puis descendant, puis montant
encore. (Yourcenar, NO: 1242)
SR Napolju se drum, kao što znaš, pruža pravo izmeÿu dva
brega, þas naviše, þas naniže, pa onda opet naviše. (p. 115)
“… the road stretches out straight between the hills …”
31. SR Podrum se protezao dužinom cele kuüe. (Stankoviü: 12)
FR La cave s'étirait sur toute la longueur de la maison. (p. 13)
“the cellar stretched out all along the house…”
54 Chapter Two
32. FR Un lac, rose des premiers rayons, s'étendait à ses pieds.

(Makine: 242)
”a lake … stretched out at her feet…”
SR Pred njom je bilo jezero, ružiþasto pod prvim sunþevim
zracima. (p. 165)
“in front of her was a lake… ’
33. FR La fenêtre de ma chambre donnait sur un immeuble en
démolition. Un mur couvert de papier peint se dressait au
milieu des gravats. (Makine: 269)
“a wall … was standing up in the middle of the rubble”
SR Prozor moje sobe je gledao na neku zgradu u ruševinama.
Jedan zid oblepljen tapetima stajao je uspravno usred gomile
šuta. (p. 184)
“a wall … was standing in the middle of the rubble”
This is not surprising given that both languages have a very rich verbal
lexicon capable of describing fictive motion—lexical counterparts can
easily be found. We would like to stress that certain spatial descriptions
including posture verbs and inanimate Figures in Serbian are translated
into French by fictive motion, as in examples (34) and (35), and
conversely, that French fictive motion descriptions are translated into
Serbian by posture verbs, see examples (33) and (36). As shown in Table
4, 10% of Serbian posture verb descriptions are translated into French by
fictive motion.
34. SR ýitajuüi, u postalji, ja sam s þasa na þas pogledao na nju kako

stoji malena a svetla i skladna stvar, u krugu svetlosti ispod
lampe. (Andriü, Žena od slonove kosti: 250)
‘a little object is standing in the circle of light…’
FR Je lisais dans mon lit et, de temps à autre, je jetais un regard à
la petite chose gracieuse et claire qui se dressait dans le
cercle de lumière de la lampe. (p. 206)
‘a little object was “standing” in the circle of light…’
35. SR Nedaleko od Krnojelþeve pekarnice, malo po strani od glavne

þaršije, stajala je gazda-Nikolina kuüa u kojoj je živeo
Mihailo. (Andriü, Anikina vremena: 80)
‘… his house was standing not far from the bakery …’
FR Pas loin de la boulangerie de Krénoyélats, un peu hors du
centre s'élevait la maison du gazda Nicola, où vivait Mihaïlo.
(p. 78)
“… his house was standing / “rising up” not far from the
bakery”
36. FR Parcourant l'île en tous sens, il finit par découvrir en effet un
quillai dont le tronc—terrassé sans doute par la foudre ou le
vent—rampait sur le sol dont il s'élevait médiocrement en se
divisant en deux grosses branches maîtresses. (Tournier : 120)
“… its trunk slithered on the ground … ’
SR Prelazeüi ostrvo u svim pravcima, na kraju je zaista otkrio
jedan kilaj þije je stablo—bez sumnje oboreno gromom ili
vetrom—ležalo na tlu iz kojeg se malo izdizalo raþvajuüi se na
dve glavne grane. (p. 82)
“its trunk was lying on the ground …”
The translation of Serbian posture verbs by fictive motion descriptions

in French is possible when the Figure entity is inanimate and when the
verb does not involve any change of location. There are some exceptions,
however, where the Figure is animate, as in example (37), or with manner
of motion verbs that lexically involve a change of location, as in the
example (36) with ramper “slither”.
37. SR Na samim vratima stoji proto, crn i bled u svetlosti luþa koji
neko drži za njim u hodniku. (Andriü, Anikina vremena, p. 71)
“on the threshold, was standing the priest…”
FR Sur le seuil même se dressait le curé, noir et pâle sous la
lumière de la torche que quelqu'un tenait derrière lui, dans le
couloir. (p. 69)
“on the threshold, was “standing” the priest…”
The fact that certain spatial descriptions including posture verbs can be
translated by fictive motion is not surprising. In an experimental work,
(Matlock and Richardson 2004) examined whether the use of fictive
motion in spatial descriptions influences eye movements, and more
generally, whether this use is associated with a particular conceptual
representation. The authors compared the eye movements that accompanied
56 Chapter Two
fictive motion (FM) sentences (e.g. The palm trees run along the
highway), and those that accompanied non-fictive motion (NFM)
sentences (e.g. The palm trees are next to the highway). In this work,
Matlock and Richardson (2004) showed that: a) all FM- and NFM-
sentences are equally sensible in meaning, b) all FM- and NFM-sentences
describe comparable information, and c) all FM- and NFM-sentences are
equally good descriptions of pictures used as stimuli. We believe that the
same holds true for Serbian sentences with posture verbs and French
translations including fictive motion. In other words, both types of
descriptions are good candidates to express the situation at hand, but the
former is preferred in Serbian, the latter in French. Why is that?
Our corpus is not large enough to answer this question definitively, but
these preliminary results confirm our intuition that French speakers will
preferably use fictive motion in describing certain static spatial scenes that
are canonically described by posture verbs in Serbian. Moreover, in many
cases, translating French fictive motion descriptions by posture verbs
seems to be more natural than translating them by fictive motion, see
example (38).
38. FR Il n'eut pas longtemps à chercher pour le découvrir. La

silhouette du grand mâle se dressait comme un rocher au
milieu d'une houle de chèvres et de chevreaux qui refluèrent en
désordre à son approche. (Tournier : 195)
SR Nije ga morao dugo tražiti da bi ga otkrio. Silueta velikog
mužjaka uspravljala se kao stena usred gomile koza i jariüa
koji su u neredu ustuknuli kada je on prišao. (p. 131) (stajala je
/ stajala je uspravno)
“its silhouette was standing like a rock in the middle of…”
Using the verb uspravljati se is not wrong, but the verb stajati would have
been better. The translator is probably influenced by the source language.
To avoid this bias, it would be interesting to collect data on the basis of
visual stimuli in order to obtain comparable data in French and Serbian.
We believe that the differences would be more important than what is
suggested by the translation data.
These observations suggest that, to express static location with
inanimate Figures, French uses either neutral verbs or fictive motion,
whereas Serbian can also use posture verbs. Since French makes limited
use of posture verbs, it uses fictive motion in reference to some situations
described by posture verbs in Serbian. Therefore, we can conclude that the
lack of an extensive use of posture verbs in French makes fictive motion

more salient.
If one now tries to define the place of fictive motion among the other
ways of expressing static location in French and Serbian, one can say that
fictive motion plays a more important role in French than in Serbian,
possibly because Serbian pays much more attention to the manner of being
positioned in space. Thus, comparing French and Serbian suggests that in
“high-manner-salient languages”, like Serbian, fictive motion is less
salient.
FR Neutral V Posture V FM
SR Neutral V Posture V FM
Schema 1: Different ways of expressing static location in French and
Serbian and their distribution
It would be interesting to examine the importance of fictive motion in

languages using a wider set of posture or positional verbs. If our
hypothesis is correct that the extensive use of posture or positional verbs
makes fictive motion less salient, then this will result in a very limited
usage of fictive motion in “high-manner-salient” languages.
4. Conclusion
To conclude, we ask a few questions that place this study in a more
cognitive perspective.
One interesting question is whether such cross-linguistic differences in
attention to fictive motion affect spatial cognition. According to (Matlock
and Richardson 2004): “fictive motion processing includes mentally
simulated motion”. This means that representations underlying fictive
motion descriptions are not static, as can be expected, but rather dynamic.
People mentally simulate motion when interpreting fictive motion
sentences. (Matlock and Richardson 2004) argue that fictive motion
“evokes a dynamic mental simulation, and that this simulation determines
how the visual system interprets and inspects the world”. One can now ask
what happens when translators use fictive motion instead of posture verbs,
as we have seen for French and Serbian. Even though both types of spatial
descriptions convey similar information, translating posture verbs by
fictive motion considerably changes the conceptual representation of the
spatial scene. Furthermore, since “simulating motion is part of fictive
motion understanding” (idem), the cognitive processing of fictive motion
58 Chapter Two
must be more complex than the cognitive processing of other ways of

expressing static spatial scenes. We can also ask whether the complexity
of this cognitive processing of fictive motion can explain its relatively
small share in the expression of static location across languages. Hence, an
extensive use of fictive motion in certain languages can in many ways
affect human spatial cognition.
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Andriü, I. 1963. Anikina vremena, Jelena, žena koje nema. Pripovetke.
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Andritch, I. 1979. Au temps d’Anika, Au temps d’Anika. La soif. Paris:
L’Age d’Homme. (tr. Anne Yelen et Jean Descat)
Andriü, I. 2002. L’Eléphant du vizir. Paris: Le Serpent à plumes.(tr. Janine
Matillon)
—. [1955] 1963. Prokleta avlija. Beograd: Prosveta.
Andritch, I. 1962. La Cour maudite. Paris: Stock. (tr. Georges Luciani)
Paviü, M. 1997. Le chapeau en peau de poisson. Monaco: Editions du
Rocher (bilingual edition). (tr. Gojko Lukiü and Gabriel Iaculli)
Stankoviü, B. 1982. Gazda-Mladen. Beograd: Nolit.
—. 2000. Gazda-Mladen. Lausanne: l'Age d'homme. (tr. Dejan Babiü)
CHAPTER THREE
THE STORY OF “O”:

FORCE DYNAMICS IN THE SEMANTICS
OF (CROATIAN) PREPOSITIONS
MARIJA BRALA VUKANOVIû
Abstract
Departing from Vandeloise's (2006) claim that space (in language) is not
an abstract entity described by geometry and/or topology, but rather a
dynamic representation based on and represented through our everyday
experience (in and with space) in the world, this paper tries to propose a
systematic reading and interpretation of the semantics of the Croatian
preposition “o”, focusing on its spatial sense. This interesting, and widely
used preposition, lacks a central translational equivalent in English, usually
rendered by “about”, “around”, “on”, “by”, “against”, “to”. The Croatian
preposition “o” is of particular interest as both its semantics and (intra- and
crosslinguistic) usage seem to defy a clear categorial representation.
Consequently, pedagogical and grammar books either treat it marginally or
describe its semantics as being highly unsystematic, chaotic and difficult to
pin down. However, by shifting the perspective on the preposition 'o' from
the traditional towards the cognitive i.e. by grounding the linguistic
analysis of the Croatian “o” in Talmy’s (2000) Force Dynamics
framework, it becomes evident that the preposition ‘o’ can be semantically
explicated as a lexical item which codes a logically ordered, typologically
based sequence of static/dynamic force exchange situations. It is extremely
interesting that this analysis shares many typological and analytical
elements with comparable analyses of prepositional systems in other
natural languages, and, most interestingly, that it substantially coincides
with Bowerman and Pederson’s (1992, 2003) findings on prepositional
semantics.
62 Chapter Three
1. Introducing prepositional semantics

Ever since the advent of cognitive linguistics, spatial language has
been attracting a great deal of scholarly interest. As pointed out in Section
1.1. of the Introduction to this volume (Brala Vukanoviü & Gruiü
Grmuša), the relations between space and language, or, more precisely, the
expression or rather lexicalisation of spatial concepts in (various)
language(s), has been studied extensively by linguists and psychologists. It
seems no exaggeration to state that studies of spatial language and
conceptualisation, and the relation between the two, have been of
fundamental importance in the development of cognitive linguistics1.
Within this broad field of research, particular attention has been focused
on the category of prepositions, which represent the focus of Section 1 of
this paper. Then, in Section 2, we turn to the Croatian preposition “o”,
which is investigated both in spatial and non spatial contexts. Finally, in
Section 3, we present our conclusions, trying to merge the theoretical
notions reviewed in Section 1 and the linguistic data presented in Section
2.
1.1 Prepositions as a word class

Prepositions are, within the research domain of spatial language,
interesting both intra- and crosslinguistically. At the crosslinguistic level
there is considerable crosslinguistic semantic variation in the field of
prepositions, and this fact clearly points to the apparent gap between
cognitive universality underlying the spatial lexicon on the one hand, and
linguistic relativity that seems to be at play when it comes to the
acquisition of spatial words, on the other. Intralinguistically, prepositions
represent a very interesting grammatical form.
“(Grammatical forms) represent only certain categories, such as space,

time (hence, also form, location, and motion), perspective point,
distribution of attention, force, causation, knowledge state, reality status,
and the current speech event, to name some main ones. And, importantly,
they are not free to express just anything within these conceptual domains,
1
Although this is true of cognitive semantics in particular, it should be
remembered that within cognitive linguistics (CL) the distinction between
semantics and grammar is not so clear as it is in traditional linguistics. In fact, CL
sees morphosyntactic forms as being meaningful, i.e. grammar as being motivated
by semantic elements and language as being best analysed and explained along the
semantico-syntactic interface.
Force Dynamics In the Semantics of (Croatian) Prepositions 63
but are limited to quite particular aspects and combinations of aspects, ones
that can be thought to constitute the ‘structure’ of those domains’’ (Talmy,
1983: 227)
Departing from Talmy’s view expressed in the words quoted above,

Slobin (1985) proposes that children, like languages, are constrained in the
meanings they assign to the grammaticized portions of language, and that,
even more interestingly for our case, there exists a difference between the
kinds of meaning expressed by open-class and closed-class forms. In fact,
the meaning of the former is seen as being essentially unbounded, while
the meaning of the latter is viewed as being constrained (cf. Slobin’s 1985
notion of ‘privileged set of grammaticizable notions’). As one of the
closed-classes of the lexicon, prepositions could then carry meaning which
is constrained. Our key question is: is this constrained meaning also
definable both in terms of the elements that the semantic pattern is
composed of, as well as in terms of the patterning principles operating on
the semantic elements?
Linguistics has, for some time now, been familiar with the idea that
syntactic categories express certain semantic traits which are common for
all members of a given syntactic category (e.g. Talmy 1983, 2000; Slobin
1985; Levin and Pinker 1991: passim). In order to try and establish a
“general meaning” for the word-class of prepositions, let us first recall the
traditional reading of the category. Linguists define prepositions as
“relational words”. If prepositions are, by definition, relational words, then
in order to understand the nature of their meaning, i.e. of the type of
relation they can establish, we need to stop for a moment and think about
the sort of things they put into relation.
Herskovits (1986: 7) notes that the simplest type of prepositional
spatial expression is composed of three constituents, i.e. the preposition
and two noun phrases (NP), as in: The spider (is) on the wall.
The two NPs (“the spider” and “the wall”) are referred to in the
literature by various names (“theme”, “located entity”, “located object”,
“spatial entity”, … for the first NP, and “reference object”, “reference
entity”, “localiser”, “landmark”, … for the second NP). The terminology
adopted in this paper is: Figure (abbreviated as “F”) for the first NP, i.e.
the object being located (more generally, related), and Ground
(abbreviated as “G”) for the second NP, i.e. the object in reference to
which F is being located (or rather, related).
The notions of Figure and Ground were originally described in Gestalt
psychology, but their application in linguistics stems from Talmy (1983),
who characterised them as follows:
64 Chapter Three
“The Figure is a moving or conceptually movable object whose site, path,

or orientation is conceived as a variable the particular value of which is the
salient issue. The Ground is a reference object (itself having a stationary
setting within a reference frame) with respect to which the Figure’s site,
path, or orientation receives characterisation” (Talmy, 1983: 232)
Given that a preposition seems to relate F’s location with respect to G

(F’s location being static in the case of locational contexts and dynamic in
the case of motional ones), we might easily be led to conclude that the
relation established by a preposition (as word class) has a locational or
rather topological nature. Indeed, many (traditional) accounts of
prepositional semantics have been based on topological properties of the
relation between F and G. However, it is enough to take a quick look at
prepositional usages to notice that the topological account, while providing
some basis for the prepositional semantic reading, does not provide an
exhaustive analytical tool. Topology alone does not suffice to explain why
the relation between a cup and a table, a picture and a wall, and a fly and a
ceiling are all lexicalized by “on” in English (where e.g. the light is not on
the ceiling, and e.g. the cup is “AUF” the table and the picture is “AN” the
wall in German). It does, furthermore, not explain why the relations
represented in Fig. 1 below are not lexicalised by the same English
preposition.
An alternative to the topological approach is that represented by the
geometrical approach, a classical view of prepositions which proposes an
explication of prepositional semantics based on the geometrical properties
and the perceptual profiling of G (more so than of F, cf. e.g. Hawkins
1993). From this point of view, it is suggested that prepositions do not link
objects, but rather geometric descriptions of objects (Herskovits 1986),
different conceptualisations, i.e. views of objects or parts thereof (e.g.
Leech 1969; Bennett 1975). An easy way to understand what is meant here
is by attempting a mental exercise whereby F and G are kept constant and
only the preposition is replaced (e.g. frog in the grass vs. frog on the
grass). We see that the mere change in preposition forces a particular type
of construal on the scene. We might wish to conclude at this point that
two-dimensional prepositional objects are linked to the usage of “on”, and
three-dimensional objects to the usage of “in”. And yet, as pointed out
perceptively by Vandeloise (1994, 2006), “on” is linked to both one and
two dimensional objects, whereas ‘in’ is linked to both two- and three
dimensional objects. Furthermore, as clearly illustrated by the sentences in
Fig. 1. below, not all three dimensional prepositional objects validate the
use of the preposition “in”. Is there any hope to solve the problem. In order
to try and propose a positive answer to the latter query, contrast sentences
1) and 2) as given in Figure 1.
(1) The smoke is under the cheese cover (2) The pear is *in/under the cheese
cover.
Fig. 1. Functional motivation of semantic profiling
Topologically, and geometrically, the relations between the smoke and

the cheese cover in (1), and the pear and the cheese cover in (2), look very
much alike. However, the problem of the unacceptability of the
preposition in in (2) (unacceptable in many cases crosslinguistically), is
easily resolved within the cognitive framework, which takes into account
features that result from our functioning as and interacting with entities in
the world. “Containment” is a good example of an interactive relation
established between entities (including ourselves) in the world. “Support”
is another one. While in (1) the cheese cover controls the location of the
smoke, in (2) it is not the cheese cover (in terms of “containment”), but
rather the table (in terms of “support”) that controls the location of the
pear. If we remove the cheese cover, in 1) the smoke “leaves” the original
location (so we see that G’s volume controls the location of F), whereas in
(2) the pear stays in the same place. So in (2) we have to say either that
The pear is on the table, or, with respect to the cheese cover, that it is
under, but in no case in it. It would hence appear to be the case that it is
not “location”, but rather “the function of controlling location2” that
seems to be at the core of prepositional semantics. Furthermore, in (2) the
cheese cover functions as an obstacle which controls the access to the
pear, which also involves a different schematization of the cheese cover
than in (1) (due to a different relation between F and G in (1) and (2)).
This is a crucial point, one which we shall return to in Section 1.2.
2
Or controlling some other type of relation.
66 Chapter Three
Before moving on, let us take stock of the situation by noting that the
notion of ‘function of control’ coupled with the notion of “schematization”
represent the main ideas underlying and guiding our analysis, and that the
semantics of prepositions is probably best interpreted as a “mixture” of
function (i.e. control – see below) and schematization.
In the next section we shall take a look at the findings of a very
interesting study by Bowerman and Pederson (1992, 2003). These findings
present strong evidence for a proposal of a systematic account of
prepositional semantics, which is grounded in elements of cognitive
linguistics. Most crucially, this evidence is based on a crosslinguistic study
of prepositional usages in 33 natural languages, and does, as such, offer
conclusions which hold at the crosslinguistic level. This is of paramount
importance, as a cognitively based account of prepositional semantics,
grounded in universal elements (which are possibly shared between
language and other subsystems of human cognition) needs to be verified
and confirmed at the crosslinguitic level.
Furthermore, the findings by Bowerman and Pederson are based on a
set of elements which can be grouped into two large categories: a)
elements of schematization (points, planes, axes, dimensionality and
alike), and b) functional elements (attachment, support, gravity / force
vectors or, more properly, force dynamics. Before reviewing the main
findings of study by Bowerman and Pederson, let us just briefly recall the
view on Force Dynamics proposed by Talmy (200:213), who states that a
force-dynamic pattern which underlies “all more complex force dynamic
patterns is the steady-state opposition of two forces”, and that it
represents a fundamental linguistic category. The view of force dynamics
as a linguistic category, i.e. the view of the opposition of two forces will,
indeed, be crucial in our explication of the semantics of the Croatian
preposition “o”. First, let us turn to the study by Bowerman and Pederson,
which provides useful elements for our analysis of “o” in Section 2.
1.2. Prepositional systems crosslinguistically

As has already been mentioned, the most striking crosslinguistic study
of prepositions is by Bowerman and Pederson (1992, 2003; cf. also
Bowerman and Choi 2001: 484-487). In this detailed study the authors
examine the physical (spatial) senses lexicalized by the English
prepositions “on” and “in”, and the ways in which these same senses (i.e.
types of spatial relations) are rendered in 33 other natural languages.
Bowerman and Pederson aptly show that all the instances of spatial
relations under consideration can be divided into 11 categories, with
categorial boundaries being drawn whenever at least one language, in

order to lexicalize one or more of these spatial relations, “switches” from
one preposition (or other lexical form)3 to another. Even more
interestingly, the authors observe that these categories can be ordered as to
form the following sequence:
Support Marks Clingy Hanging Fixed Point – to Encircle Impaled Pierces Partial Inclusion
from on attachment over / attachment - point with / spitted through inclusion
below a against attachment contact on
E.g. surface Raindrops Picture Handle on Apple on Ring on Arrow Cigarette Apple in
Cup on Writing on window on wall cupboard twig finger Apple in / in mouth bowl
table on on stick through
paper apple
Fig. 2. The ON-IN scale of spatial meaning categories (Bowerman and

Pederson, 1992, 2003)
This ordered sequence of meaning categories is, at the crosslinguistic

level, differently partitioned into meaning clusters. E.g. Spanish and
Portuguese lexicalize the whole range with one preposition only (“en”, and
“em” respectively), English, uses two prepositions (“on”, and “in”), while
German and Dutch partition the scale into three ‘prepositional segments’
(“auf”, “an” and “in” for German, “op”, “aan” and “in” for Dutch), etc.
The most striking observation is that the portions of the scale attributed to
different prepositions are “compact”, i.e. there is no language which would
lexicalize part of the scale with “on”, then part of the scale by “in”, and
then part of the scale by “on” again. If there is overlapping at all (i.e. if a
language uses two prepositions interchangeably for one or more
categories) this always occurs in the section of the scale which is
“transitional” i.e. between the categories in which the use of only one of
the two prepositions is possible4. All this leads to the hypothesis that the
ON-IN scale is not formed on a random basis, but that there must be an
underlying “gradient”, something more powerful than “linguistic
arbitrariness” governing the formation and arrangement of its categories.
3
The study by Bowerman and Pederson is not about prepositions per se, but about
the expression (or rather, semantic categorization) of “ON” and “IN” spatial
relations in natural languages. Thus, apart from considering adpositions (as the
lexical form most frequently used for the expression of the on-in relation) the
authors also consider spatial nominals (used in, e.g., Japanese and Korean), and
case endings (used, e.g., in Finnish).
4
E.g. in Hindi, categories 5 – fixed attachment, and 6 – point-to-point-attachment,
can be lexicalized by two prepositions: 'per' or 'me'. Categories before category 5
are lexicalized by ‘per’ only, categories from category seven – by ‘me’.
68 Chapter Three
Taking things a step further, from the observational into the

explanatory realm, Bowerman assumes the position that although the
categories could be universal, linguistic relativity might nevertheless be
strongly at play when it comes to the distribution of (prelinguistic?) spatial
concepts, i.e. the organization of the spatial lexicon. In fact, she seems to
be suggesting that the universality of spatial conceptualization is difficult
to reconcile with the diversity and relativity of the acquisition of spatial
relational words (cf. Bowerman 1996).
Yet, the two should not necessarily be irreconcilable. Vandeloise
(1998, 2003, 2006) offers hope for reconciliation between a set of spatial
prelinguistic concepts and the view of linguistic relativity departing from
two very important observations:
a) prototypical spatial configurations are not essentially perceptual

(as is the case with colour or other natural categories), or perhaps
more exactly, they are not locational but rather functional5;
b) related to a) - the connection between the different words used for
lexicalising various portions of the ‘in’-‘on’ scale will remain
difficult to establish for as long as one looks at categories
described in the scale as topological concepts (as Bowerman
does). What should be done is observe the distribution of (even
locative) prepositions by taking into account dynamic factors.
The dynamic factor which links containment and support is their

function of control (in one-, two- or three- dimensions). This fact leads to
the possibility of connecting various categories (e.g. ‘containment’, ‘tight
fit’, ‘attachment’ etc.) into a hierarchy.
1.3. A hierarchy of prelinguistic concepts

Vandeloise’s proposal (1998: 7) looks like the following:
5
Vandeloise (1998: 6) writes: ‘Even though some of the traits involved in the
characterization of relationships container / content and bearer / burden like
surrounding, contact, or order in the vertical axis are perceptually registered, the
fundamental trait of control involved in containment and in support can only be
noticed when it fails to work. In other words, while the kinetic mechanics is always
noticeable, static mechanics involved in support and containment escapes the
attention as long as the balance is respected’ (i.e. as long as the function of
control - be it containing or supporting - is ‘plus’ +).
control
control in more than one direction control in the vertical axis

containment support
virtual or effective effective direct control control by

control control intermediary
containment tight fit support attachment
Fig. 3. Vandeloise’s hierarchy of prelinguistic concepts (source:

Vandeloise 1998: 7)
We are looking at an extremely perceptive and valuable proposal. It is,

namely, the first analysis (at least to my knowledge) that tries to
“systematically” decompose the classic primitive candidates of
“containment” and “support” in terms of dynamic forces, hence suggesting
another potential trait which might be underlying categorial intentions, and
also the only view suggesting a “hierarchic” organization of prelinguistic
concepts, this latter being of particular relevance for our analysis.
In fact, Bowerman’s categories can now, following Vandeloise
suggestions, be treated as complex primitives (referring to relationships,
i.e. dynamic factors). They are called “primitive” because they are seen as
prelinguistic concepts, and “complex” because they need to be described
by a list of properties which behave like traits of family resemblance-cf.
also Vandeloise 1998: 11-15). It should be noted, however, that in order to
apply Vandeloise’s analysis summarised in Fig. 3. to the semantic clusters
in Fig 2., we have to distinguish virtual from effective control and we have
to rearrange the hierarchically lower components in the ‘support’ branch
(‘attachment’ comes before ‘support’ proper), so that the lowest
components in the tree in Fig. 3. match the categories in Fig. 2. (for the
full elaboration of Fig. 3. see Brala 2000, Chapter 3; 2007). The aim of
this exercise is to decompose the internal structure of the complex
primitives that, at a lexical level, are mapped onto the “on”–“in”
prepositional range. Departing from the hypothesis that Bowerman’s
categories of spatial relations are formed (and later organized into meaning
70 Chapter Three
clusters) on a combinatorial basis, out of universal, primitive, bodily based

semantic features, shared between the human language faculty and other
sub-systems of human cognition, in our concrete case the range of “on”–
“in” static spatial meanings can be explicated in terms of varying
combinatorial patterns of different values (or features) within only three
domains6: DIMENSIONALITY, ORIENTATION, and ATTACHMENT.
Let us take a look at each of them.
DIMENSIONALITY (a domain relative to the number of axes of G

that are taken into consideration for the purposes of linguistic expression),
yielding (for the purposes of explanatory needs of the range of
prepositional usages under consideration) four features, i.e.: 1DIM (one-
dimensional), 2DIM (two-dimensional), CIRCLE, and 3 DIM (three
dimensional or “containment proper“).
ORIENTATION (a domain which does not yield features but is based
on the simple opposition between “+”, i.e. “present“ vs. “-“, i.e. “absent“).
“Orientation present“ refers to the 90q or the 180q angle with respect to
the Earth’s force of gravity (as exercised on the F). Thus the reading is:
‘parallel or perpendicular to the force of gravity’, when the domain is ”+”,
or just ‘inclined with angle irrelevant’ when the domain has the ”-”
value7; and
ATTACHMENT - Conflated with boundedness – since their separation
seemed to complicate the picture without any gains at the explanatory
level – the domain of ‘attachment’ is best understood as the quantity of
6
It has been shown that a) spatial information in the brain is modal (we seem to
have representations or maps of motor space, haptic space, auditory space, body
space, egocentric space, and allocentric space; cf. Bloom et. al., 1996). We note
that the primitive, bodily based features proposed here as the bases of prepositional
semantics, seem to mirror the cognitive multimodality of spatial perception (i.e.
“contact” would mirror haptic space, “gravity” - body / motor space, and
“orientation” - motor / visual space); and b) neural information about space does
not include (detailed) representations of objects (in space), i.e. there seems to be a
clear (although not total) separation between the neurobiological “what” and
“where” systems. With respect to this we might wish to recall a very insightful
analysis by Landau and Jackendoff (1993), discussing the divisions between the
linguistic “what” and “where” systems, as well as Talmy’s (1983: 227) or Slobin’s
(1985) proposals suggesting that the “what” system is expressed by open class
words, whereas the “where” system is lexicalized by the closed class portion of
language.
7
This domain bears an interesting relation to some recent studies in human
perception (cf. e.g. Gregory, 1998) suggesting that human beings are inclined to
perceptually adjust slightly leaning objects to 90 or 180 degrees).
attachment between G and F that seems to be relevant for lexicalisation.

This domain seems to yield two features: ATTACHMENT (simple
contact or attachment via man-made means such as screws or glue) and 1
SIDE BOUNDED ATTACHMENT.
These eight features now enable us to systematize the crosslinguistic
variation in the ‘on-in’ range of spatial usages, as shown in Fig. 48.
Support Marks on Clingy Hanging Fixed Point – to – Encircle

From a surface attachment over / attachment point attachment with
below against contact
1DIM 1DIM 2DIM 2DIM 2 DIM 2 DIM CIRCLE

+OR - OR. -OR + OR. - OR. + OR. - OR
ATTCH ATTCH ATTCH ATTCH ATTCH 1SBATTCH ATTCH
Impaled / spitted on Pierces through Partial inclusion Inclusion
3DIM F 3DIM G 3DIM 3DIM

- OR. - OR. - OR.
ATTCH. ATTCH. 1SBATTCH
Fig. 4. The ON-IN gradient decomposed in terms of basic, bodily

features
The above division is interestingly paralleled by some results from

studies of the brain, i.e. plenty of neurobiological evidence (cf. Bloom et.
al., 1996; Deacon, 1997)9.
1.4. A new reading of prepositions

Summing up the conclusions reached up to this point we stress the
most important idea: the categories on the “on-in” scale are not to be
viewed as topological but rather functional configurations. From this
perspective, the reading of prepositional semantics, i.e. the reading of the
meaning of the relational lexical unit PREPOSITION runs as follows: in
terms of which features does G control the location of F? The answer to
8
Which is exactly what we get if we first switch the places of the “support branch”
and the “attachment branch” on the right hand-side of Vandeloise’s tree (on the
“control in the vertical axis – support” side), and then switch the right and the left
hand-side branch. Such a procedure enables us to come up with a tree that can be
perfectly mapped onto Bowerman’s ON- IN gradience scheme.
72 Chapter Three
this question represents the F’G’ relation proper, i.e. the answer to this
question determines the choice of the preposition.
This simple formula easily explains certain perceptual differences in
the construal of reality previously noted between “frog in the grass”, vs.
“frog on the grass”; for “in” to be a possible lexical choice, G needs to
control the location of F in terms of voluminosity, whereas for the English
“on” G controls the location of F in one of its (G’s) axes (usually the
horizontal or the vertical). We thus have the perceptual “adjustment” (or a
specific conceptualization) of G on a particular occasion of speaking,
whereby G’s features that are triggered by the given preposition (i.e. the
features forming that prepositional lexical pattern), gain prominence. Such
a “mapping” of features between lexical patterns and referents would
apply to language as a system, including its metaphoric devices (cf. Brala,
2002). If this were the case, then the features and patterns (as well as
patterning principles) proposed above would need to help explain the
semantics and usage distribution of other prepositions (in other languages)
as well. Let us see whether this turns out to be, indeed, the case.
2. The story of “o”

In the remaining part of this article, we will try to take a look at how
the above theoretical notions and assumptions work in practice. We shall
focus on the Croatian preposition “o”. This choice of the preposition has
been motivated by the following facts:
- The usage of the Croatian “o” is, at least at first glance, highly
unsystematic both at the intralinguistic and the crosslinguistic level. There
appears to be no clear semantic base that would bring together all the
usages of the preposition, thus enabling linguists to propose its clear
semantic explication. Not surprisingly, a thorough literature review of the
meaning and usages of the Croatian preposition “o” has yielded more
fragmentary (and occasionally contrasting) data and hypotheses than
conclusive results. This is very problematic as “o” is a lexical item of very
high frequency in Croatian (see below).
- In the monolingual context, “o” seems to defy a clear semantic
characterization, but also to be very peculiar when it comes to instances of
usage. Although being described as the preposition introducing the
locative case (c.f. Siliü and Pranjkoviü, 2005: 230-231) this preposition is
nowadays extremely rarely used in its strict spatial sense (locating
something spatially). ‘O’ is, in fact, used primarily in non-spatial locative
case constructions (introducing the locative case object specifying the
topic of e.g. speech, thought or means), and most people see its spatial
usage as being stylistically marked and still present only in (archaic)
idiomatic constructions. It seemed very interesting to investigate the
relation (if any) between the spatial and the remaining (predominant) non-
spatial usages of “o”;
- The situation with the semantic characterization of “o” is, if possible,
even more complex if we observe the issue from a crosslinguistic
perspective, i.e. try to translate “o” into, in our case, English.
Lexicography offers no help in this sense, more frequently than not
entirely ignoring the spatial usages of “o”10. It thus seemed very
interesting to investigate whether there is a logic in the apparent
crosslinguistic i.e. translational chaos of the semantics of the Croatian “o”;
- The analysis by Bowerman and Pederson (see Fig. 2 above), i.e. their
“ON-IN” prepositional scale proposes a category (No. 6, “point to point
attachment”) with examples of prepositional usages which are in Croatian
rendered by “o”. It seemed interesting to investigate whether the semantic
feature structure of this category can reveal anything with respect to the
semantics of the Croatian preposition “o” (and vice-versa);
- Crucially for our cognitively based theoretical framework, the usages of
the Croatian “o” are rendered in i.e. translated into English generally by
“on” and “around”, with the instances of spatial relations denoted by the
preposition “o” falling either into category 6 (“point-to-point attachment”)
or category 7 (“encircle with contact”) of Bowerman and Pederson’s scale.
This fact seemed worth investigating further, as it might possibly turn out
to present additional evidence for the ordering of the scale (as the two
categories are contiguous), as well as a finding suggesting that (at the
crosslinguistic level) there might be (the need for) another semantic/lexical
category between categories 6 and 7 (combining elements from both
categories, and perhaps yielding new ones).
2.1. The usages of “o”

The Croatian preposition “o” is placed 14th11 in the Token frequencies
list of the Croatian Language Corpus, edited by the Institute for Croatian
10
In the widely used Croatian – English dictionary by Bujas (1999), under the
entry “o” we find “o=about, concerning, regarding, at, by”. The spatial sense is not
represented at all.
11
The relative frequency for 'o' is put at 0.00526018827553, which makes it the
14th most frequently used lexical item in the Croatian language, out of the total of
1.058.171 lexical entries included in the Token frequencies list of the Croatian
Language Corpus.
74 Chapter Three
language and Linguistics. This means that “o” is the 14th most frequently
used lexical item in the Croatian language (the first two being “i”, i.e. the
Croatian for “and”, and “je” i.e. the Croatian word for “is”). This fact
alone should suffice to explain the need to try and semantically pin down
this preposition. Even more interestingly, a closer look at the Institute’s
Corpus reveals that over 90 percent of usage instances are relative to the
locative case construction expressions of non spatial meanings, whereas
only the remainder relates to the spatial usages of “o” (which are, indeed,
those that native speakers frequently seem to find as “marked”, “frozen”,
and “unproductive”). We need to observe at this point that the preposition
“o” is used within the so-called “case help question” that school children
use to learn the cases as part of the “locative case help question” (the
locative is taught as the case responding to the question “o kome o þemu”
– transl. as “about whom, about what”).
Now, a paradox relative to the semantics and usage of “o” needs to be
noted at this point; while being used primarily in the connection with the
locative, which is, as the name suggests, a “case of location”, i.e. primarily
a case for the expression of spatial meanings (and such meaning are
introduced by prepositions such as “on”, “in” and “at” – three prepositions
whose central translational equivalents in Croatian – “na”, “u” and “pri” –
most frequently introduce a noun in the locative case), the Croatian “o” is
very rarely linked to the expression of space. At the same time, as if the
picture needed to be complicated even further, the preposition “o”, when
used in spatial contexts, most frequently selects a noun in the accusative
case (this fact is analysed in 2.2.)
Now, going back to the most common usages, we note that the
preposition “o”, most frequently followed by a locative noun, is used for
the expression of12:
- the object (topic) of the verbs of speech, though and similar,

e.g.
(3) Govoriti o majci.
To talk + PREP + mother LOCATIVE
To talk about the mother.
(4) Misliti o sinu.

To think + PREP + son LOCATIVE
To think about the son.
12
The list of usages is based on Aniü (1994), Siliü and Pranjkoviü (2005), and my
own analysis.
(5) Pjevati o moru.

To sing + PREP + sea LOCATIVE
To sing about the sea.
- causal meanings (denoting causal relations) and/or means,

e.g.:
(6) Ne brinite o mojim postupcima.

No + worry + PREP + my + actions LOCATIVE
Do not worry about my actions.
(7) Putovati o svome trošku.

Travel + PREP + one's own + expense LOCATIVE
To travel at one's own expense.
- pointing to an end point of an activity (very frequently this

activity involving strong force), e.g.
(8) Udarati lancem o kamen.

To hit + chain + PREP + rock ACCUSATIVE
To hit the chain against the rock.
On the other hand, the preposition “o” is much more rarely, almost
marginally, used for the expression of:
- temporal relations (marked usages, primarily in cases of

holiday or other recurrences), e.g.
(9) Posjetiti roditelje o Božiüu.

To visit + parents ACCUSATIVE + PREP + Christmas LOC.
To visit parents at Christmas.13
- instances of proper spatial relations, e.g.
(10) Puška mu visi o ramenu.

Gun + him + hanging + PREP + shoulder LOCATIVE
The gun is hanging on his shoulder.
13
Where, as pointed out by Siliü and Pranjkoviü (2005: 231) a more common
construction would be “Posjetiti roditelje oko Božiüa” (to visit parents around
Christmas).
76 Chapter Three
As space is, with time, the central topic of this volume, we shall first
turn to the analysis of this latter, most peculiar, highly marked and most
confusing category of the usage of the Croatian “o”, the spatial usages.
Then, in Section 2.3., we will try to see whether the spatial senses bear any
relation to the more productive, non-spatial usages, and also try to see how
do our conclusions tie into the theoretical framework proposed in Section
1 above.
2.2. Where is the spatial “o”

The typical spatial usages of “o” are illustrated below. The sentences
on which the analysis of the meaning of the Croatian preposition “o” in the
spatial senses are based, have been taken from the Croatian national
corpus (eight sentences marked with CNC), and a further four sentences
included in the sample are those which have been most frequently
proposed as examples of spatial usage of “o” by Croatian native speakers
(4h year students of English and Croatian of the Faculty of Philosophy,
University of Rijeka). The usages under consideration cover both the
literal (spatial) and metaphorical meanings of “o”. Once I had compiled
the list, I asked 40 native speakers of Croatian (20 of which students, not
including the students who proposed examples of sentences) to rate the
“naturalness” i.e. “acceptability” of the sentences on a scale from 1 to 5,
where 1 stands for totally unacceptable and 5 for totally acceptable. The
sentences are listed below, in decreasing order from the most acceptable to
the least acceptable, with the mean value of the acceptability rating given
in brackets. Every sentence is first glossed (where the Croatian “o” is
glossed only as PREP for preposition, as it is impossible to offer a single
gloss) and then translated / rendered in English (with both the Croatian and
the English prepositions highlighted).
(11) Kopaþke je objesio o klin.’ (4.87) CNC (and also the most
frequently cited example of usage proposed by the students, we ought to
note that this is an idiomatic expression)
Boots + has + hung + PREP + nail ACC.
He hung his boots on a nail.
This is a fixed phrase with the meaning 'he retired', quite accurately
rendered by the English phrase He hung up his boots14.
14
This phrase has most frequently been translated as “he hung his boots on a nail”
(which is rated as “relatively acceptable although not entirely natural in English”
(12) Život mu visi o niti.’ (4.86) CNC

Life + him + hanging + PREP + thread LOC
His life is hanging by a thread.
(13) Nerad mu se obio o glavu. (4.73)

Mess + him + bounce back + PREP + head ACC
This is a phrase that cannot be literally translated but can be rendered

by two English idioms:
a) He's reaped what he's sown.

b) His chickens have come home to roost.
(14) Val udaraše o hridi. (4.07) CNC

Wave + hit + PREP + rocks ACC
The waves were crashing against the rocks.
(15) Kopaþke su obješene o klin.’ (3.47)

Boots + have + hung + PREP + nail ACC
The boots have been hung up (on the nail).
(16) Konj bijaše o drvo zavezan.

Horse + was + PREP + tree ACC + tied
The horse was tied to a tree.
(17) Zapela je o kamen.’ (3.33) CNC

Trip + has + PREP + stone ACC
She tripped over a stone.
(18) Nit ona omotala o tanku strijelu. (3.27) CNC

Thread + she + *aroundwrapped15 + PREP + arrow ACC
She wrapped the thread around an arrow.
(19) Hodao je oslonjen o njezino rame. (2.80)

Walked + has + leaning + PREP + her + shoulder ACC
He was leaning on her (shoulder) as they walked.
by a group of English native speakers. For the native speakers' intuitions I wish to
thank Joe Cutting, William Candler and Lawrence Groo).
15
“Omotati” is a prefixed verb (o + motati). The stem verb “motati” disallows the
PP introduced by the preposition “o” but requires a PP introduced by “oko”
(around).
78 Chapter Three
(20) Ogrlica se njojzi sijala o vratu. (2.53) CNC

Necklace + has + her + sparkling + PREP + neck LOC
The necklace was sparkling around her neck.
(21) Djeca su se hvatala majci o pregaþu. (2.20) CNC

Children + have + themselves + pulled + PREP + apron ACC
The children were pulling at their mother's apron.
(22) Sjedio je oslonjen o njezino rame. (2.20)

Sit + has + leaning + PREP + her + shoulder ACC
He was sitting leaning against her shoulder (static!)
(23) Kopaþke su visjele o klinu. (1.87)

Boots + have + hanged + PREP + nail LOC
The boots were hanging on the nail.
2.3. Analysis: sense in the madness of (the spatial) “o”

Several things are worth noting at this point:
Let us begin by re-stating that the spatial usages of “o” are non-
prototypical (the prototypical ones being those listed in 2.1.). Within the
non-prototypical usages listed in section 2.2. above, we see a number of
spatial usage subcategories that need to be looked at more closely.
I) We first need to observe that the spatial senses of “o” can be

subdivided into a) physical (sentences 14 through 23), and b)
metaphorical (sentences 11 through 13). The cognitive linguistic
framework proposes metaphor as one of the most productive principles for
semantic extensions from the prototypical (central) meanings toward more
peripheral, but still related meanings. It is generally known that spatial
metaphors are used for many other domains, and it is thus not surprising to
see the extent to which the spatial “o” is used in the metaphoric sense.
However, the fact that sentences 11, 12, and 13, i.e. the three sentences
with the highest acceptability rate all express metaphorical space is, to an
extent, counterintuitive. We would, in fact, tend to expect that space (in
the physical sense) takes precedence over metaphor (metaphor being a
mapping on the more central, prototypical spatial usages), and seeing the
metaphoric usages being rated as more appropriate than the “more basic”
spatial ones does, indeed, represent an out-of-the ordinary native speakers’
behaviour, i.e. a puzzling surprise. We shall return to this point below,
when we try to explain the semantics of “o”, since this interesting fact
seems to bear some relation to the basic semantic structure

(conceptualization) of the preposition “o”.
II) In the spatial sense, the semantics of “o” seems to be used in two
distinct categories: a) the category in which “o” broadly means “point-to-
point attachment”, with crucial force-exchange in this point (and this is
indeed the meaning of “o” in sentences 11 through 23, excluding 18 and
20), and b) the category in which “o” denotes a relational situation which
is close to that lexicalized by the English “around” (the meaning
lexicalised by “o” in sentences 18 and 20). For the moments, let us just
note that “point-to-point” and “(a)roundedness” (i.e. “encircle with
contact”) are adjoining categories (categories 6 and 7) in Bowerman and
Pederson’s gradients (see Figs. 2 and 4 above).
III) The Croatian “o” is a preposition that combines with (at least) two
cases: a) the locative (all sentences in 2.1. except (8) and sentences (12),
(20) and (23) in 2.2.), and b) the accusative (sentence (8) in 2.1. and 10
out of 13 sentences in 2.2. above). We see that, within the PP headed by
“o”, the locative is predominant in the non-spatial and the accusative in the
spatial contexts. This is an extremely interesting and potentially far
reaching observation, especially in view of the claim that case meanings
bear a relation to at least some element(s) of the meaning expressed by the
preposition (for a thorough review of this point see Šariü 2008, passim).
Contrasting the meanings generally associated with the locative vs. the
accusative, we may gain some insight into the various meaning
components of “o”. The accusative case is, in Croatian grammar books,
generally described as “the case of directionality or, rather, the expression
of a relation between two objects where one object, part thereof or some
space in its vicinity is seen as the goal of motion or goal of some other
activity linked to that object’ (Siliü and Pranjkoviü 2005: 223, transl.
mine). The locative case in, on the other hand, viewed as “the case of
spatial location. It is used for the description of place, where this place is
static, motionless” (ibid: 230).
It is obvious that the dichotomy between the accusative and the
locative is largely determined by the distinction between the dynamic
(associated with the accusative) and the static (associated with the
locative). And, indeed, the spatial sentences with the locative express
static situations (such as that expressed in sentence (20), of a necklace
hanging around the neck), whereas those with the accusative express
dynamic situations. This is clearly illustrated by the contrast between
sentences (11) (“He hung the boots on the nail”, where the nail is in the
80 Chapter Three
ACC case), and (23) (“The boots are hanging on the nail”, where the nail
is in the LOC case). In sentence (11) there is the force dynamic element of
the positioning of the boots (where the action of putting/placing the boots
“meets” the “opposing” force of the nail, i.e. the wall). The nail, here,
represents the end-point of an activity and a point of opposition between
two forces (a situation of “dynamic force exchange”–cf. Vandeloise,
2006), and hence the accusative case. In (23) the boots have been placed
already, the action is finished, and “o” is expressing a static situation
(where we still have a point, i.e. the nail, where the force of gravity is
exercised against the force of the nail, held by the wall). Following
Vandeloise (2006) we shall call this a situation of “static force exchange”.
We could thus conclude that the situations of dynamic force exchange
require “o” to be followed by a noun in the accusative, whereas “o” in
static force exchange situations seems to select a noun in the locative case.
However, sentences (16) and (22) seem to contradict our conclusion. In
(16) (“The horse was tied to a tree” ACC), we have what, at least at a first
glance, appears to be a static situation. However, knowing that the
preposition “o” can, in this sentence, be used only with animate subjects
(usually animals), that can exercise a certain force and pull the rope by
which they are tied to the tree, thus creating a force dynamic (point-to-
point) situation of opposing forces, explains the usage of the ACC in this
case. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that we could not use the
preposition “o” in, say:
(24) *Konop je o drvo zavezan

Rope + has + PREP + tree ACC + tied
The rope was tied *to a tree.
but would need to use the preposition “oko” (i.e. “around”) instead,
just as in English.
In close relation to the above, we also note that in sentence (22) (“He
was sitting, leaning against her shoulder”) the noun “shoulder” is also in
the ACC case, while the sentence is, basically, static. However, upon
closer inspection, we note that “o” in sentence (22) is not so much relative
to the “sitting” as it is to the leaning, which is dynamic (the force of the
person “leaning”, being “opposed” against the body of the person
“supporting” the leaning. We thus, again, have a clear force dynamic
element associated with “o”, followed by the accusative noun. The English
preposition “against” clearly renders this fact16.
Before concluding this section on spatial usages of “o”, we need to
take a look at another usage of this preposition, taken from Šariü (2008:
102):
(25) Udario je rukom o stol (alternatively: u stol).

Hit + has + hand + PREP + table ACC
He hit his hand against the table (alternative: into the table)
(in the sense of the idiomatic meaning: to throw your weight
around)
Šariü also observes that the following usages disallow “o”:
(25a) Udario se u glavu (*o glavu)

Hit + himself + PREP + headACC
He hit himself into the head (but not: *against the head)
(25b) Udario ga je u glavu (*o glavu)

Hit + him + PREP + headACC
He hit him into the head (but not: *against the head)
Šariü suggests that the situations coded with the “o”-accusatives are less
intentional than those coded by the “u”-accusatives. However, upon closer
inspection, we note that the difference between the licensed and the non
licensed usages of “o” seems to be something other than intentionality (as
we cannot really say that hitting someone is not, or at least cannot be,
intentional). In (25) the focus is on the action of hitting (and hitting against
something! – a clear force dynamic element), rather than on the place
(location). In (25a) and (25b), on the other hand, we have the object
(taking in the force, i.e. the force dynamic opposition) already specified by
the object (reflexive “himself” in 25a, and the “him” in 25b). The PP in
these two latter cases specifies the location (what is being hit, what is
being hurt, wounded, in the sense of WHERE), rather than primarily
expressing the meaning of the force dynamic element of the opposition of
force. The distinction between “o” being acceptable in (25) but not in
(25a) and (25b) seems to boil down exclusively to the expression of a
force dynamic element (or lack thereof). In all three cases under (25) we
16
It would be very interesting to investigate why English uses the preposition “on“
for the same “leaning“ situation, but in the walking context (see sentence 19).
82 Chapter Three
have the noun in the accusative, as in all three cases the noun is the
“recipient” of the action, the end-point of the activity, but in (25a) and
(25b) what is lacking is the focus on force, rather than on place (thus “o”
not being licensed in the two latter cases).
We conclude that the preposition “o” has the potential to express both
static and dynamic elements, and that its usages with the LOC noun relate
to static (location) situations (verbs), whereas the usages of “o” with the
ACC noun relate to dynamic (motional, or other situations where the force
of motion is in a force-dynamic frame highlighted as being in opposition
with another force). Crucially, however, we note that the spatial usages of
“o” with the locative are very rare, and when they are found, they are rated
as being of borderline acceptability by around half of the subjects who
took part in the study (see low acceptability rating of sentences 20 and 23).
This fact stands as a further argument supporting the claim that the use of
“o” in the spatial contexts is validated primarily when the focus is on the
opposition of force (the (end-)point (of action) where two opposing forces
meet, thus the noun of the “o” PP being in the accusative case).
To sum up, trying to explicate the semantics of (the spatial) “o”, we
note that “o” is a preposition the core meaning of which is the expression
of a relation between F and G that is characterized primarily in terms of
G’s function of “opposing force” to a force exercised by F. from the point
of view of dimensionality, F and G can either be viewed as point-like (in
all the point-to-point attachment situations, see comment II above), or G
can be seen as a circular entity (in all the “around”, i.e. “encircle with
contact” interpretations of “o”). It needs to be pointed out, however, that
the “around” sense of “o” is very rarely used in the spatial sense (being
taken up by “oko”, i.e. “around”17). The core semantic element (a
primitive semantic feature?) of “o” can thus be described as a function of
(point of) force exchange (where, as shown above, this exchange can be
either static or dynamic). Another crucial component of the semantic
pattern of “o” is “attachment”; if there is no contact between F and G
(either spatial or metaphorical), the preposition “o” cannot be used to
lexicalize the relation between F and G. In a way, this is a logical element,
since it is only through contact that the force exchange between F and G is
realised.
17
“Around“ is the central translational equivalent of the Croatian “oko”, whereas
the central translational equivalent of the Croatian “o” is “about”.
3. Conclusion
In the final section of this work, we will try to link the observations
relative to the analysis of “o” in spatial contexts to the broader picture of
the usages of “o”. Let us begin by contrasting the cases of the nouns
within the “o” prepositional phrase (henceforth PP) in 2.3. (where in most
instances we have the noun in the accusative case) vs. the cases of the
nouns within the “o” PP in 2.2. (where in most instances we have the noun
in the locative case). It becomes immediately obvious that the locative
case is generally found with the noun within the PP where “o” is used with
non-spatial (non-physical) verbs (such as think, talk, sing, teach, preach),
whereas spatial (physical) verbs more frequently (almost exclusively)
require a PP headed by “o” where the noun is in the accusative case. In
this latter category, the dichotomy accusative vs. locative can be linked to
the dichotomy dynamic vs. static force exchange (see analysis in 2.3.). We
are, once again, faced with a somewhat counterintuitive fact: the
predominant use of the “prototypically locative” preposition is non-spatial
(where, furthermore, it commands a noun in the accusative case).
Let us approach this puzzle by looking at etymology. The preposition
“o” is derived from the preposition “oko”. The Croatian prepositions “o”
and “oko” are, indeed, still interchangeable in many situation. This is, e.g.,
the case of all temporal usages of “o” (cf. also footnote 13 above i.e. the
comment that “oko” is in more common usage than “o” in sentences such
as 9). “Oko” can replace “o” (and is by most native speakers felt as the
“better choice of preposition”) in sentences (16), (18) and (20) (note here
the use of “around” in English translations of “o”). We see that “o” and
“oko” are, indeed, very close semantically (another argument in favour of
Bowerman and Pederson’s gradient, at least for categories 6 and 7).
We see that the semantic pattern of “o” contains (at least in origin)
elements of “force dynamics”, “contact” and “circularity”. With time, the
circularity function is taken up more and more by “oko” (having a more
precise locational function in terms of circularity). “Force dynamics”
remains as the core semantic element of the relation expressed by “o”,
whereas the “locational” situation functions of “o” are taken up by other,
locationally “more precise” prepositions (“on”, “in”, “at” etc.)
Nowadays, “o” is thus used primarily in the sense of “about” (non
spatial, central usage of “o”), where the central meaning component, or
rather the sense, is that of “being in contact with the topic” (the “force” i.e.
action of the verb “ending” on the object introduced by “o” – a situation of
static force exchange between the verb and the topic, thus also the topic
being in the locative case, see 2.1.). In these, non spatial usages of “o”
84 Chapter Three
illustrated in 2.1. it is almost as if “o” were “positioning” the relation

between the verb (act of speech, thought, or similar) and the topic.
The above conclusions are reinforced by what was observed under I in
2.3., i.e. the fact that spatial metaphoric usages of “o” have a higher
acceptability rating by native speakers than proper spatial, physical
relations lexicalized by “o”. From the metaphoric point of view, what is
important or rather what is in focus in all relations lexicalized by “o” is,
indeed, the force dynamic semantic component of the relation. In all
instances of metaphoric usage of “o” it is, indeed, the element of force, or
rather force exchange, that is being mapped from the spatial domain onto
some other domain (this being the case of e.g. “life hanging by a thread” in
sentence (12) or employing force of character to make a decision in
sentence (25) above).
In order to try and sum up our main findings of this analysis of the
Croatian preposition “o” we could sum up its usages (and semantic
network) as comprising three clear, but closely related categories:
a) Non spatial (static, “about” sense, act of speech,

thought or similar verb “against”, i.e. “meets” the
topic); static force exchange ĺ noun within the “o”
headed PP in the LOC
b) Spatial usages:
i. Spatial static (static force exchange, noun
within the “o” headed PP in the LOC):
ii. Spatial dynamic (dynamic force exchange,
noun within the “o” headed PP in the ACC)
The idea that space (and spatial metaphors) are governed by cognitive
universals informs much current cognitive science. This idea also
permeates into the interpretation of single (closed class) word forms. The
view of force dynamics, as being both cognitively grounded and
linguistically “primitive”, is reinforced by the findings stemming from the
above analysis of the Croatian “o”. Of course, the ultimate goal of any
research in the vein proposed above, is not to ask “which relations are
profiled” but, ultimately, propose an answer to the question “which
relations could be profiled, and how”. In other words, a cognitively
grounded analysis of (prepositional) semantics has, as its ultimate goal,
that of trying to discover a) the set of basic, atomic features that selectional
functions can operate on, and b) the linguistic mechanisms that can be
performed on these features (describe the relational functions). This paper
represents a possible step in this direction.
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capacity. In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition. Vol. 2:
Theoretical Issues, edited by D. I. Slobin. 1157–1256. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Šariü. LJ. 2008. Spatial Concepts in Slavic. A Cognitive Linguistic Study
of Prepositions and Cases. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
Talmy, L. 1983. How language structures space. In Spatial orientation:
Theory, research, and application, edited by Pick, H. & Acredolo, L.
New York: Plenum Press.
—. 2000. Towards a Cognitive Semantics. Vol I: Concept Structuring
System, and Vol. II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vandeloise, C. 1986. L'espace en francais: semantique des prepositions,
Travaux Linguistiques. Paris: Seuil. [Transl. as (1991). Spatial
Prepositions: A case study from French. Chicago. The University of
Chicago Press].
—. 1994. Methodology and analysis of the preposition “in”. Cognitive
Linguistics, 5 (2), 157-184.
—. 1998. “Containment, support and linguistic relativity”. MS.
—. 2003. Containment, support and linguistic relativity. In Cognitive
approaches to lexical linguistics, edited by H. Cuyckens, R. Dirven &
J. Taylor, 393-425. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
—. 2006. Are there spatial prepositions. In Space in Languages: Linguistic
Systems and Cognitive Categories, edited by M. Hickmann and S.
Robert, 139-154. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
CHAPTER FOUR
VERIFYING THE DISTRIBUTIONAL

BIAS HYPOTHESIS:
AN ANALYSIS OF TAMIL
LAVANYA SANKARAN
Abstract
The distributional bias hypothesis predicts that native speakers follow the
predictions of the aspect hypothesis (Anderson and Shirai 1994: 137-139).
The aim of this research is to test whether adult native speakers of Tamil
are indeed influenced by the inherent semantic aspect of verbs when they
use aspect and tense markers in the way that children acquiring a first
language are. FLA studies focusing on English, French, Spanish and Italian
support the aspect hypothesis in that they have shown that children
associate past and perfective inflections with achievement and
accomplishment verbs, while progressive and imperfective inflections are
strongly associated with durative verbs (Anderson and Shirai 1994:135).
However, in order to validate the aspect hypothesis data from a range of
non-European languages is urgently needed. Before the aspect hypothesis
can be verified in Tamil, however, it is necessary to study verb-predicate
patterns of adult native speakers in order to obtain the background
knowledge needed for a study on L1 acquisition of Tamil. Tamil would
make an interesting study language because it uses separate linguistic
devices to code distinctions between both tense and aspect. The fact that
aspect marking is not obligatory in Tamil, whereas the marking of tense is,
also makes important predictions for the aspect hypothesis. The aspectual
markers1 that I have incorporated in my study are “iru”, “kondiru” and
“idu”. “Iru” is an auxiliary that expresses the perfective or the imperfective
aspect depending on the situation type it occurs with. “Kondiru” marks the
progressive aspect, while “vidu” expresses the perfective aspect. (Lehmann
1
There are several aspectual markers in Tamil such as the self-benefactive marker
“koo“ and the future utility marker, “vayyi“, but I will only be focusing on three
aspectual markers in my research.
88 Chapter Four
1993: 205) (Saeed 1997: 121) For the purposes of the present study these
markers have been integrated into a comprehension task, a production task
and an imitation task, which have been carried out with three adult native
speakers of Tamil from Singapore. By examining and consolidating data
from these three different performance modalities, I have tried to draw a
comprehensive picture of which aspectual and tense markers interact with
which verb types and thereby attempt to verify the distributional bias
hypothesis.
1. The distributional bias hypothesis

The distributional bias hypothesis was proposed in the wake of the
aspect hypothesis. While the aspect hypothesis makes particular reference
to the interlanguage of L1 and L2 learners and claims that past and
perfective inflections are strongly associated with resultative verbs and
that progressive and imperfective inflections are strongly associated with
durative verbs, studies have shown that adult native speakers display a
similar pattern of verb morphology. Shirai (1991) conducted a study
whereby he analysed the speech of three first language learners of English,
as well as the mother’s speech to her children and discovered that the
distribution of inherent aspect with past and progressive inflections in the
motherese followed the aspect hypothesis. This led to the formulation of
the distributional bias hypothesis which postulates that “native speakers in
normal interaction with other native speakers tend to use each verb
morpheme with a specific class of verbs, also following the aspect
hypothesis”. (Anderson and Shirai 1994: 137-139)
The distributional bias hypothesis suggests a possible source for
learners’ use of verb morphology and lends credence to both Brown’s
(1973) and Stephany’s (1981) proposition that language learners are
sensitive to certain characteristics made evident in the input they receive.
They claim that this explains why the patterns of association displayed in
learners’ interlanguage between tense, aspect markers and aktionsart
correspond to the verb morphology patterns of adult native speakers of
that language (Li 1990: 150). Anderson & Shirai (1994) go further in their
formalisation of the distributional bias hypothesis and propose a reason as
to why native speakers use verb morphology in a way that adheres to the
aspect hypothesis. They believe that proficient native speakers are guided
by certain cognitive mechanisms that are motivated by discourse
organisational principles which native speakers follow when using a
language. It is important to remember, however, that native speakers
exhibit only a strong statistical tendency in the direction of the aspect
Verifying the Distributional Bias Hypothesis: An Analysis of Tamil 89
hypothesis rather than an absolute adherence. (Anderson and Shirai 1994:

134, 146).
2. Aktionsart, aspect and tense

The core assumption of the analysis of any temporal-aspectual system
is that aktionsart, aspect and tense cannot be treated completely
independently of each other because they each describe the temporal
structure of situations and their functions complement each other. The next
three sections give a brief outline of what is meant by the terms aktionsart,
aspect and tense, following which will be a discussion on the Tamil
language with respect to these categories.
2.1 Aktionsart
Aktionsart is a German word that means “kind of action”. It
specifically refers to the way in which verbs and their arguments are
classified according to their inherent temporal properties (Li 1990: 4).
Aktionsart, also called the inherent lexical aspect of a situation is not
encoded in the morphology of a language but is simply an intrinsic part of
the semantics of the verb predicate that expresses the situation (Anderson
1991: 308). Vendler (1967) characterised these situation types based on
their individual temporal properties and categorised them according to
whether they were states2, activities, accomplishments or achievements.
Smith C. (1991) built on Vendler’s system and added the situation type
semelfactive. These situation types or lexical classes were distinguished
according to whether they are telic, durative or dynamic (Saeed 1997:110-
114) (Smith C. 1997: 3) (Shirai and Andersen, 1995: 744). The table
below clearly illustrates how situation types can be classified according to
their inherent temporal features.
2
Both internal stative verbs (“believe” and “love”) and posture verbs (“sit” and
“stand”) are categorised under stative verbs. Though this may be the case, in my
experiments I have distinguished posture verbs as a category separate from the
stative situation type because I suspect that posture verbs in Tamil are dynamic and
involve a change of state. This needs further investigation however.
90 Chapter Four
Situations Telic Durative Dynamic

States - + -
Activity - + +
Accomplishment + + +
Achievement + - +
Semelfactive - - +
2.2 Aspect
“Aspects are different ways of viewing the internal temporal
constituency of a situation” (Holt 1943: 6). In other words, aspect focuses
our attention on all or on a particular part of a situation and hence gives it
a temporal perspective. That is why it is sometimes referred to as
viewpoint aspect (Smith C. 1997: xiii). Unlike aktionsart, aspect is
considered a grammatical category and is expressed by means of the
inflectional morphology of that particular language (Comrie 1976: 9).
There are two main types of aspectual perspectives, the perfective and
the imperfective. The perfective aspect focuses on a situation from the
outside, as a single unanalysable whole, whereas the imperfective aspect
focuses on the inside of a situation without specifying its initial or final
endpoints. Under the imperfective aspect, there is a distinction between
durative and progressive situations where the latter is a subdivision of the
former. Progressiveness in fact incorporates durativity with non-stativity.
It should also be noted that the term perfect is distinct from perfectivity.
The perfect does not refer directly to a situation, but refers to a past
situation which has present relevance (Comrie 1976: 3, 4, 12). The full
aspectual meaning of a sentence is derived from the interaction between
the situation type and the “viewpoint” taken of that situation type.
2.3 Tense
Tense marks temporal deixis in that it places a situation in time
(assuming a linear time concept), taking an external viewpoint. Tense
usually locates the time of a situation relative to the utterance time. In
European languages, tense is formally marked using inflections, but it can
also be expressed through other linguistic devices such as adverbials. The
three most common tenses are the past, present and future tenses. A
situation that is marked for the past tense is located prior to speech time, a
situation marked for the present tense is located simultaneous to speech
time and a situation marked for the future tense is located subsequent to
speech time.
3. The Tamil language

Tamil is one of the major members of the Dravidian family of
languages. It is mainly spoken in the southern part of India in the state of
Tamil Nadu and is one of the official languages in Sri Lanka and
Singapore (Kothandaraman 1997: v). Tamil is an agglutinating language
and inflections are marked with suffixes attached to the verb’s lexical
base/stem. There are no prefixes or infixes in Tamil and the simplest verb
form is the bare stem which expresses the 2nd person singular imperative.
Suffixes follow the stem with decreasing relevance to the inherent
meaning of the stem.
The preferred word order in Tamil is SOV. Finite verbs must mark
tense and subject/verb agreement, but not necessarily aspect. In other
words, the marking of tense is obligatory while the marking of aspect is
not. An aspectual marker in finite contexts thus has to be inflected for
tense and PNG (Schiffman 1999: 82). The order can be expressed in the
following manner: Verb + Aspect + Tense +PNG. Each affix in Tamil
usually encodes only one feature. The following section will look at
aspectual auxiliaries in some detail.
3.1 Aspectual auxiliaries

Aspectual markers in Tamil are denoted by auxiliaries and they express
viewpoint aspect. Most aspectual markers which have been
grammaticalised and which now have a syntactic role can be
etymologically traced back to some lexical verb that is still in use.
Aspectual auxiliaries follow only verbal or conjunctive participles and can
also be marked for tense and PNG (Schiffman 1999: 82). The verbal or
conjunctive participle refers to the second tenseless non-finite verb form
which has both a positive and negative counterpart. It expresses an action
that is preceding or forming part of, is simultaneous with or leading up to
the action of the main verb and is marked by ‘-thu’ which has five
variants, ‘-tthu, -nthu, -i , -ppu and -y’ (Lehmann 1993:72). Below are
descriptions of the three aspectual markers under exam, “iru”, “vidu”, and
“kondiru”. It is important to note that of these three aspectual markers,
only “vidu” can occur in its verbal participle form i.e.”-vittu” in a verbal
participle clause. When “-vittu” adjoins a verbal participle clause to
another clause, it expresses the relation of temporal succession.
92 Chapter Four
3.1.1 The aspectual marker “iru”
The auxiliary verb “iru” is derived from the lexical stative verb “iru”
which means “be”. When “iru” is added as an aspectual marker to a non-
stative main verb it implies “the result of the action continues to be what it
is” (Annamalai 1997: 51), and hence expresses the perfect viewpoint
(Lehmann 1993: 206, Saeed 1997: 117). The example below illustrates
this using the achievement situation type verb constellation, “find ring”.
Eg 1: Divya netru aval mothirathai kandupidith-iru-nthaal.

Divya yesterday her ring-dat find-iru-3rd.sg.fem.past.
“Yesterday Divya had found her ring.”
When “iru” occurs with a stative verbal participle, however, it presents

the imperfective aspect and makes the stative action ongoing and
continuous, without giving any indication of the action being completed
(Lehmann 1993: 206) (Saeed 1997: 117). This is shown in the example
below:
Eg 2: Hari nam viitt-il thangi-iru-kkiraan.

Hari our house-loc stay-iru-3rd.sg.masc.present.
“Hari is staying in our house.”
3.1.2 The aspectual marker “vidu”
The lexical verb “vidu” which means “leave” becomes an aspectual

marker when it occurs after a main verb in the verbal participle form. As
an aspectual auxiliary it expresses the perfective aspect when it implies
that an action has definitely been completed (Lehmann 1993: 209).
Eg 3: Megha kizrei vilunthu-vitt-aal.

Megha down fall -vidu- 3rd.sg.fem.past
“Megha fell down.”
3.1.3 The aspectual marker “kondiru”
The auxiliary verb “kondiru” marks the progressive aspect and

indicates that the situation takes place over a period of time thus
emphasizing that the action is durative and dynamic (Annamalai 1997:
57). The example below makes this clear.
Eg 4: Selvi samaithuk-kondu-iru-nthaal.
Selvi cook-kondu-iru-3rd.sg.fem.past.
“Selvi was cooking.”
3.2 Tense suffixes

There are three tenses in Tamil, the past, present and future tense,
which are denoted by overt suffixes or allomorphs. Tamil verbs are
classified according to the set of tense allomorphs that occur with a
particular verb stem. The verb stem of a certain class takes a tense suffix
of the set of allomorphs that have been assigned to that particular verb
type. Any given verb only occurs with one allomorph of each set. These
tense allomorphs are also capable of expressing personal endings (PNG)
(Arden 1942: 137).
4. The interaction between aktionsart, aspect and tense

In order to explore the interaction between aktionsart, aspect and tense,
I conducted 3 pilot tests on 3 adult native Tamil speakers from Singapore.
These tests comprised a comprehension task, a production task and an
imitation task. The reason why they were in three different performance
modalities was because each of the tests were expected to give rise to
qualitatively different results, which, when consolidated, would contribute
to the drawing up of a relatively accurate picture of what native speakers
understand about aspect and tense markers and the way in which aspect
and tense interact with each other and with aktionsart.
4.1 The comprehension task

In order to test the comprehension of aspect markers with all aktionsart
categories, this task contrasts the imperfective marker “kondiru” with the
perfective marker “vidu” and the perfect marker “iru” using picture
sequences. The informant is presented with a pair of picture sequences and
3 sentences where one sentence presents the imperfective viewpoint,
another sentence presents the perfect viewpoint and the third presents the
perfective viewpoint. The informants’ task is to match each picture
sequence with the sentence that corresponds best to the picture. The
informants had the picture sequence pairs in front of them while the 3
sentences were being read out. The sentences were then shown to the
informants who then had the task of matching the appropriate picture with
94 Chapter Four
the appropriate sentence3. All the sentences presented were inflected for
the past tense4 for purposes of standardisation, so as to make sure that only
aspect (and not tense) was being tested for comprehension. There were 18
picture sequences5 altogether; three pairs for each situation type (posture
verbs, internal stative verbs, activity verbs, accomplishment verbs,
achievement verbs and semelfactive verbs). Each picture sequence was
presented in a pair, one which showed an ongoing situation and another
which showed a completed situation.
From the data it was seen that the perfective “vidu” and the
imperfective “kondiru” were contrasted systematically for activity,
accomplishment, achievement and semelfactive events. The informants
did, however, claim that for activity situations “iru” could also be marking
imperfectivity 33.3% of the time. For semelfactive verbs this was claimed
only 11.1% of the time. For achievement situation types the perfect “iru”
was contrasted with “kondiru” 11.1% of the time and for semelfactive
verbs this occurred 22.2% of the time.
The results of the comprehension task showed that the adults seemed
to have a good understanding of what viewpoint “vidu” and “kondiru”
present. Although the majority of occurrences contrasted the perfective
“vidu” with the imperfective “kondiru” for complete and incomplete
situations respectively in the case of activity, accomplishment,
achievement and semelfactive situations, the case is less straightforward
for posture and internal stative verb types. The perfect “iru” was
contrasted with “kondiru” 77.8% of the time for posture verbs and 55.6%
of the time with the internal stative verbs. This seems to contradict the
claim that “iru” presents the imperfective viewpoint when it occurs with
statives, which is what is claimed in the literature. The perfective “vidu”
was only contrasted with the imperfective “kondiru” 22.2% of the time for
posture and internal stative verbs. Also, “iru” was used to describe both
the incomplete and complete events 22.2% of the time for internal stative
verbs. It can be seen from the data that these informants’ intuitions are
unclear regarding the viewpoint that “iru” presents when it occurs with
posture and stative verbs and also when it occasionally occurs with the
other verb types.
3
Neither the picture sequences nor the sentences were presented in any predictable
order.
4
This may have affected the results of the data but there was no other way of
testing the comprehension of only aspect.
5
There were two pictures which made up one picture sequence.
4.2 The production task

This task explores how native speakers mark aspect and tense with
relation to aktionsart. Situations using toys were enacted for the three
informants, who were then asked to describe what they had seen. Twenty-
four situations6 in total were enacted. Four of them conveyed posture
situation types, seven of them corresponded with activity type situations,
another four conveyed accomplishment type situations, five communicated
achievement type situations and the last four corresponded to situations
which were of the semelfactive type. The distribution of the aspect
markers, “iru”, “kondiru” and “vidu” with the various situation types is
coded and tabulated in the bar chart below.
Aspect markers with situation types
120
100
Percentage
80
60 Series1
40
20
0
Achievm
Achievm
Achievm
Activity
Activity
Activity
Semelfact
Semelfact
Semelfact
Posture
Posture
Posture
Accompl
Accompl
Accompl
Iru Vidu Kondiru

Aspect + situation type
The production task: Chart 1
The results from the production experiment show that the patterning of
aspect markers with situation types follows the predictions of the
6
Since it is difficult to enact internal stative situations (eg: “love” or “believe”) I
decided to leave this category out of the production task.
96 Chapter Four
distributional bias hypothesis. The perfective “vidu” is used 100% of the

time with accomplishment and achievement situation types and the
imperfective “kondiru” is used 100% of the time with activity situations
and 83.3% of the time with semelfactive7 situations. The aspectual marker
“iru” occurs exclusively with posture situation types. It is not clear,
however, if “iru” presents the perfect or the imperfective viewpoint in this
instance. The 5 situation types were not always inflected for aspect.
Activity and achievement situations were the only verb types that were
marked8 for aspect most of the time when compared with the other verb
types. Recall that aspect marking is not obligatory in Tamil but that tense
marking is.
The patterning of tense inflections with different verb types has also
been tabulated. The chart below illustrates the informants’ use of the past
and present tense together with the different verb types.
Tense markers with situation types
120
100
Percentage
80
60 Series1
40
20
0
Achievm
Achievm
Activity
Activity
Semelfact
Semelfact
Posture
Posture
Accompl
Accompl
Past Present
Tense + situation type
The production task: Chart 2
7
Semelfactive verbs, though inherently punctual, are atelic and dynamic and
therefore are predicted to generally pattern with a progressive marker which would
focus on its internal successive phases.
8
Activity verbs occurred with the imperfective “kondiru” and achievement verbs
occurred with the perfective “vidu”.
The results follow the predictions made by the distributional bias

hypothesis. Past inflections predominantly associate themselves with the
resultative accomplishment and achievement verb types and the present
tense is used predominantly with the atelic and durative activity, posture
and semelfactive verb types.
This leads to the question of what kind of relationship exists between
tense and aspect markers. From the experiment it was observed that there
are strong correlations between the progressive marker, “kondiru” and the
present tense inflection, especially when they interact with activity verbs.
In the case of the perfective marker, “vidu”, it is strongly associated with
the past tense inflection, especially when “vidu” and the past tense both
co-occur together with accomplishment and achievement verbs. “Iru” does
not show any preference for a particular tense marker. Based on these
results it can be concluded that as the distributional bias hypothesis would
predict, the inherent temporal properties of the verb types strongly
influence the kinds of aspect and tense markers they attract.
4.3 The imitation task

This task involves presenting the informants with a number of
sentences9 that associate various situation type verbs with the aspect
markers, “iru” (the perfect/progressive marker), “kondiru” (the progressive
marker) and “vidu” (the perfective marker), and asking them to imitate the
sentences as accurately as possible. The aspect markers were not
combined with the different verb types in any predictable order. All the
main verbs were inflected for the past tense in this experiment as I was
interested in investigating only the interactions between aspect markers
and verb types. Slobin and Welsh (1973) believe that when one imitates a
sentence, one not only tries to recover the meaning of the sentence, but
also filters it through their own productive system. Thus, when attempting
to imitate a sentence, if the informants hesitate, or change the sentence in
any way, we can make inferences regarding the appropriateness of certain
aspect markers with certain verb types (Li 1990: 125).
I presented the three informants with twenty-two sentences, 18 of
which were suffixed with an aspect marker. The six different situation
types; posture, internal statives, activity, accomplishment, achievement
and semelfactive situation types, were suffixed with “kondiru”, “iru” and
“vidu”. There were four filler sentences which were only inflected for the
9
All the sentences were made up of 9-10 words. This is the number which would
slightly exceed the short-term memory capacity of the average adult.
98 Chapter Four
past tense. I expected my informants to either hesitate or modify those

sentences which combined “vidu” with an “internal stative verb” and
“kondiru” with an achievement verb type. The results show that
informants modified other sentences as well.
All my informants modified the sentence where “kondiru” co-occurred
with an achievement verb type. In the case where “kondiru” was paired
with an internal stative verb, two informants modified this sentence. But, I
would not rule out the acceptability of “kondiru” with internal stative
verbs because in the sentences where “iru” and “vidu” were paired up with
internal statives, my informants on some occasions modified those
sentences replacing them with “kondiru”.
With regards to “iru”, my informants seemed unanimously
uncomfortable with accepting it with activity verbs, accomplishment verbs
and semelfactive verbs. They were all agreed, however, with its
compatibility with posture verbs. When my informants were asked to
repeat a filler sentence which had just a posture verb inflected for the past
tense, all of them repeated it without a problem, but two of the three
informants introduced the marker, “iru” into the verb predicate.
In the case of “vidu”, it does not sit comfortably with posture verbs or
with internal stative verbs, but it is perfectly acceptable with all the other
verb types.
The results do not show which aspectual markers and situation types
are strongly associated with one another. It also seems impossible to know
which situation types and aspectual markers are completely unacceptable
together. The results of the task do however indicate which situation types
and aspectual markers are acceptable when they co-occur and suggest that
certain combinations are preferred to others.
5. Conclusion
The results from the three experiments do to a large extent support the
distributional bias hypothesis. From the production task it was seen that
the present tense marker and the imperfective “kondiru” are strongly
associated with activity verbs, but also co-occur frequently with atelic
durative verb types such as posture verbs and semelfactive verbs. Also, the
past tense marker and the perfective “vidu” have strong associations with
resultative verb types such as accomplishment and achievement verbs.
“Iru” has strong associations with posture verbs but it is unclear as to
whether my informants use this aspectual marker to present the
imperfective viewpoint or the perfect viewpoint, i.e. it is unclear as to
whether “iru” marks the durative nature of the act of sitting or whether it
marks the result of the change of state from the standing posture to the
sitting posture. This uncertainty is made evident from the comprehension
task. While my informants are sure as to the viewpoint both “vidu” and
“kondiru” present in the comprehension task and are able to contrast them
systematically for complete and incomplete situations respectively, they
use “iru” to mark both complete and incomplete situations without being
sure of what viewpoint it really presents. This is especially noticeable for
posture and internal stative verb types where “iru” occurs most of the time.
This is not in accord with what is written in the literature about Tamil
since “iru” is said to mark the imperfective aspect with stative verb types
and the perfect viewpoint with non-stative verb types. One explanation
that could be offered to account for this is that “iru” is a marker that is still
in the process of grammaticalisation10. It is thus difficult to make any
concrete claims with regards to the semantics of “iru” because it is subject
to variation (Schiffman, 1999).
In the imitation task it was seen that certain combinations of aspectual
markers and verb types were preferred to other combinations. The
combinations of the perfective “vidu” with resultative verbs and
combinations of the imperfective “kondiru” with atelic durative verbs
were never corrected. This seems to suggest that these combinations are
perfectly acceptable. It was also seen that “iru” has strong associations
with posture and internal stative verbs which is in accord with the results
from the production and comprehension tasks. The fact that all three tasks
indicate that posture verbs and internal stative verbs occur most of the time
with “iru” might imply that “kondiru” and “vidu” are not entirely
acceptable with these verb types. However, this point needs to be
investigated further.
In summary, the results of the three experiments above do support the
distributional bias hypothesis. This would suggest a possible source of
learners’ use of verb morphology if Tamil children display similar verb-
predicate patterns to adults. Similar experiments with Tamil children
would need to be carried out, however, in order to explore this.
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Smith, C. 1991. The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
—. 1997. The Parameter of Aspect. (2nd ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer

Academic Publishers.
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Language. In Child Language: An International Perspective, edited by
Dale, P.S. & Ingram, D. Baltimore: University Park Press.
Tai, J. H-Y. 1984. Verbs and Times in Chinese: Vendler’s Four
Categories. Papers from the Para-session on Lexical Semantics, edited
by D. Testen, V. Mishra & J. Drogo: 289-296. Chicago: Chicago
Linguistic Society.
Vendler, Z. 1967. Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell
University Press.
PART II:
SPACE AND TIME IN LITERATURE

CHAPTER FIVE
FICTIONAL TOPOGRAPHIES DILUTING

THE POLARITY OF THE CENTRE
AND ITS MARGINS:
A COMPARATIVE ACCOUNT OF THE LATE
NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH
AND CROATIAN NOVELISTS
SINTIJA ýULJAT
Abstract
This paper reveals the concord in the treatment of the fictional space
complex topography, thus declining the existent Eurocentric cultural
stereotypes and the ideologically founded polarity of the metropolitan and
provincial in the European novel at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Thomas Hardy and Ante Kovaþiü happen to have overcome
developmental discontinuities of the “prime” English and “secondary”
Croatian literatures by deploying imaginary landscapes meant to sustain a
narrative ethics that would promote a substantial change of the image of
proper place and re-institute one’s right to difference. The two authors
engender narrative landscapes focused on space exposed to change. Their
narrative spaces are atopical places created to symbolize their characters’
unstable national, gender, and class identities. These characters are at one
with the landscape, which comprises the lapses of their previous selves, as
they do not fully accommodate the collective identity formation process.
The authors compared here pursue a certain topophilia through the
narrative figure of space, and insist on replacing city space notions by the
notions of edge, periphery, or province. They are moderators of the literary
circumstance of their epoch: Hardy clings to the idea of British literary
decentralization, while Kovaþiü advocates Croatian right to national
independence through spiritual decolonization. By structuring their
fictional spaces they mark the need to neglect the territorial and political
Fictional Topographies Diluting the Polarity of the Centre and its Margins 105
agents that largely determine the range and impact of a literature in real
spacetime. Markedly reluctant to abide by the received ideas about
ourselves and others, Hardy and Kovaþiü resort to a narrative
innovativeness of their fictional worlds.
The European novel at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries swerves from the canonized temporal and spatial principles of
the plot setting in that the authors base their stylistic modes upon the
deployment of semantically potent narrative spatial figures. Copious
novelistic production in the European context at the time derives from the
socially auspicious circumstance allowing for the assertion and dominion
of the novel on the market. The social conditions that launched the
formation and spread of English, French, or German realistic novels were
at odds with the conditions foregrounding Croatian novels of the realistic
period.
The map showing impact of the realistic novel in Europe delineates the
range of this literary genre in the languages of “primary literatures,” but it
remains deficient and incomplete when it comes to the marking of the real
European novelistic space. That is the map displaying the peaks of
novelistic output within the boundaries of Great Britain, France or
Germany: the echo of the representative bourgeois or “metropolitan”
novels, largely Bildungsromane, is far-reaching not only because of their
being widely translated in the rest of Europe but also because of the
yearning for their content and narrative techniques to be implemented on
the European periphery. A map of this kind does not recognize the
existence of the so-called borderline or liminal novels existent outside the
mainstream of the primary and secondary European literatures. The
authors discussed here, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Ante Kovaþiü
(1854-1889) share an artistic orientation to build the spacetime of their
novels by means of alternative narrative figures and devices alone. They
deemed the need for change and transition from the collective vision of
identity to the individual insights of the subject as their creative defense
from the onslaught of the respective sociologically motivated novelistic
standards.
The collective labelling of these authors as regionalists within their
own cultures at the time only confirms the readiness of the literary
recipients and interpreters’ to equate the alteration in the novelist
perspective with limitations of the selection and treatment of the provincial
complex in literature. The exit to the very edge of the normative, that is to
say fictionalised space seems to be the substantial, central point of the
literary procedure of these authors, that they materialize in a unique
spiritual landscape, or a fictional link between place and characters. The
106 Chapter Five
remembrance of the limitations of the subject’s endeavours is thus set off

by the global spatial figure of periphery. The congruence of Hardy’s sense
of doubt and duality on the Wessex margin and Kovaþiü’s striving for
decentralization on the postillyric (postromantic or protorealistic period in
the history of the Croatian novel) Croatian literary horizon happened to
have terminated developmental discontinuities and differences.
The spaces created in literature up to then disclose the constructed
uniformity of taste and prevalence of the novelistic products of “primary”
literatures over “secondary” ones. The fictional topographies of Hardy and
Kovaþiü pursue to display divergence on a spatial basis that is inclusive,
indivisible and not exclusive, or dissociative. Despite their initial
difference in material (cultural) support, they tend to articulate narrative
space as a correlative for the iconoclastic, subversive poetics of
indefiniteness, irresolution and deprivation of the subject, markedly
evocative of Schopenhauer’s pessimism at the very oncoming of art
nouveau. These authors discard literary conventions in a significant
synergy and promote narrative innovativeness originating from
not/belonging to a certain space.
Hardy’s novels The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of
Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Ubervilles (1891), Jude the Obscure
(1894), and Kovaþiü’s travesty Meÿu Žabari/Amongst Us Locals (1886),
and the masterfully outlined polyphonic novel U registraturi/In the
Chancery (1888) explore the values of domiciliation through the prism of
narrators who deliberately persecute themselves to the margin, because
only in the process of fictional expatriation could the dual sensitivity of the
turn of the centuries be modulated.
The creating of the landscape as an immanent narrative principle in
which Hardy’s displaced or priggish characters and Kovaþiü’s anti-heroes
consistently project their self-realization asserts a singularly modernist
narrative stance against the comprehensive and linear realistic narrative
plane. The protagonists’ stories lapse into indefinite, mystified space and
evolve into its connectives. Applying their idiosyncratic figurative
toponymies, Hardy and Kovaþiü localize their characters’s space in order
to separate them from the binding immutability and finiteness of the
centre. The individual traverses of Clym Yeobright, Michael Henchard,
Tess and Kovaþiü’s Laura come to pass in the interspace diluting the
linearity of the narrative and the expected outcome in the clash of the
centre and province. The encoded systems of topographic meanings
impregnated by authorial spatial metaphors probe the invariably advocated
moving towards the centre and sustain hesitation, inadequacy,
procrastination of departure, staying in the borderline or liminal areas.
Changing places in pursuit of happiness, a proposition of the

Bildungsroman, fails to fully complement Hardy and Kovaþiü’s fictional
protagonists’ identities. The ethical-aesthetical valence of the space seems
to be superior to the respective characters’ one-time plight; moreover, the
space assumes an aspect of infiniteness and callousness/indifference. A
view from the edge, from the innermost province declines the conviction
of personal growth warranted by spreading of oneness in space, but it
draws attention to the co-existence of differences.
The late nineteenth British and Croatian novelistic complexes reflect
the crisis of history and social ideals within the two cultural contexts
(British imperial assertiveness and self-complacency counterpointed with
the subservience of Croatian territory pertaining to the Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy). Thomas Hardy and Ante Kovaþiü are the moderators of the
literary circumstance of their day and advocates of British literary
devolution and Croatian adhesion to the legacy of autonomous culture, the
attributes of which are contained in their fiction with the emphasis on
spatial figures.
In delineating the sublime fictional space it is necessary to shift from the
geographic setting and coordinates largely determining the range of
literature in real time. The Eurocentrism of the novel as the paradigmatic
narrative genre and its spatial uniformity linked to the life of the
metropolis lends itself to revision with the advent of modernity. The
received historical and institutional postulates were recognized as modes
of thinking and constructs to be found as alternatives to the foregrounding
of the rift between the centre and periphery and, accordingly, in the search
of new substance to the novel. No longer do we witness the one-way
transfer of stylistic devices from one literature to the other, but the
translation of the entire scope of cultural references, especially those
serving as collective constituents of individual identity, and amongst
which the story’s spatial facets used to be the most equivocal. Space in its
extensive meaning gives way to the figurative transformation of landscape
through which mode the consistency of the collective values of one’s own
community is being questioned.
This paper is based upon the principles of comparative literary
morphology that accumulate and distinguish the formative, sanctioned,
commonplace features of the novel with narrative spaces moulded so as to
redefine stock spatial figures. The parallelism of Thomas Hardy’s poetics
thriving apart from the European novelistic mainstream and the
intransigent poetics of Ante Kovaþiü stemming from the Croatian
periphery, or more pointedly, semiperiphery (Moretti 1999: 149)
emphasizes the unwavering authorial interest in suggesting that the
108 Chapter Five
decentralized fictional spatial identity should be observed as a counterpart

of the modern, disintegrated, or displaced subject.
Hardy and Kovaþiü, both late nineteenth-century authors of two
European novelistic spheres do surmise, quite independently of each other,
that the binary opposites of nature and culture, country and the city, centre
and margin are inherent to the definitions of civilizational progress and
transferrable cultural models. Therefore, they will tend to create
alternative cultural subtexts, fictional spaces as substitutes for the use of
these opposites in the representational modes of realism and naturalism.
Their toponymy seems to be tantamount to what they deem the likely
remaining space of perceptive and expressive freedom.
The relation between British literature in the period of the decline of
imperial might and Croatian literature sustained in the social setting of a
semicolony on signing the Croatian-Hungarian covenant of 1868 could be
apprised outside the polarities of “primary” and “secondary,” “major” and
“minor” literatures provided that we accept the notion of the artists’
universal particularity and interdependence. The link discerned here
involves, on the one hand, an open-minded and self-made European author
enslaved by the trappings of a highly-finished and ideologically
affirmative poetics, engrossed in the strife for his own status, and
discontented with the policy of British literary supremacy and aversion to
launching continental cultural ties, and, on the other, a fervent Croatian
intellectual committed to the probing of convictions about the provincial
character of his culture, imprinted in the collective mentality.
To Kovaþiü’s view, Croatian provincial identity ensues not only from
subjection to the imperial project but also from constant interference with
diverse forms of knowledge import. Kovaþiü’s notions about the European
literary scene derive from his reading the original Russian and German
novels and the translations accessible at the time. He tackles the revision
of Croatian place reference as outlined in the prescriptive Austro-
Hungarian imperial system discourse, and fills the void in the process of
cultural self-identification. Kovaþiü reflects the ubiquity of the Croatian
spatial and institutional lateral position as another instance of doxa, or
ideology-based fixation. There are many more ambivalent elements to the
Croatian condition of his time: the complex of isolation from the world,
and of standing apart from the hub, yielding to an allotted peripheral role
and a fear from cultural assimilation.
Kovaþiü endeavours to display the interiorized dynamics of the
Croatian landscape by finding in it the whole array of formally new genre
constituents. The carnivalization of the provincial life in his unfinished
travesty Meÿu žabari captures the very meaning of the province as a
psychological category. Interestingly enough, the novel ran to no more

than ten numbers due to a certain reader’s discontent with the author’s
acerbic criticism of the petty bourgeois opportunist decorum flourishing in
a circumspect small town of Žabje Lokve (literally Frog Pond),
“outwardly a city, but country to its very bone” (Kovaþiü 2000: 37), thus
proving Kovaþiü’s diagnosis of his readers’ horizon being proportionate to
the horizon of the marginalized environment. The province of his kind
stands out as the outcome of the territorial i.e. political appropriation in the
flow of history of the region, or a catalyst in the process of validating the
imperial hierarchy rather than it signifying a genuine and multifarious
national identity.
Thomas Hardy observes the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as an opportunity for juxtaposing the resilience and insularity of
the British novelistic perspective of the day with the continental one. The
ideologically affirmative discourse of the British Bildungsroman is being
declined when he links his respective characters to their proper place: by
locating them he also pins them down and hinders their incentive. Self-
realization is always possible in situ, or at least in the interstices, the in-
between of two places, it does not have to be a socially approved quest for
happiness in the city. The act of leaving a village or a small town for the
city reads as a regressive undertaking. Hardy’s fictional world dismantles
the late Victorian notional reality, presenting us with characters whose
experience of locality is indelibly imprinted on their individual memory.
Contrasted with the national geopolitical contours in the map of Europe,
fictional sites are not narrative connectives alone but standpoints meant to
enliven one’s right to his own landscape and terminate the community’s
control over the impact of locality, to “decolonize it or erase boundaries
drawn just in the name of institutional dominion” (Kiberd 1995: 6).
In the late nineteenth-century there is a disparity over the interpretation
of the meaning of the Croatian site between newly-fledged fictional and
historical practices. There goes the conflict of the two constructs, the
former completing the representational modes of historical discourse, and
cutting down on the iteration of notions on the apartness of Croatian
identity and the unfavourableness of being positioned in a “minor”
language.
The two authors of the literally disparate sociocultural points of
Europe, exponents of the self-standing and “marked” British literature and
the “unmarked” Croatian literature, to abide by the Eurocentric
ideologisms, assume a complementary set of narrative modes to articulate
the ethos of the nonurban landscape, a particular genius loci, or a
significant interspace overlapping with the exploits of the protagonists’.
110 Chapter Five
Sustaining localization and traversing to the borderline regions of the

British Isles (Cornwall, Cumberland) and to the Croatian hinterland, they
show interest in the sujet rather than the plot, and assert the British and
Austro-Hungarian provinces as intermediate literary references. Their
respective narrative topographies weave the web of characters, landscape
and social backdrop into individual destinies.
This comparative account does not include Thomas Hardy as a generic
representative of the core Western literature and exporter of fictional
models but as a rare example of the authorial renouncing the self-
understood notion of one culture excelling or subsuming others. He creates
his Wessex alterity to counterpoint the utilitarian-imperial assumptions of
the national culture. Parallel to his changeable Wessex landscape
countenance (Egdon Heath, Rainbarrow, Casterbridge, Weydon, Marlott,
Christminster) that recollects local life losing its substance at the turn of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the local identity moulded in his
prose is shattered by the friction between city and the country, province
and metropolis. The return of the native in his novel signifies the
deliberate act of an individual who does not want to become a subject of
the Victorian body collective and therefore takes up a mission
disentangled from the Victorian social norm. The aspects of Egdon Heath
materialized in a spatial narrative figure lead to the mystery of Clym
Yeobright’s internalized space.
Ante Kovaþiü, the other pole of this fictional brotherhood running
across European borders and divisions despite the different cultural
geographies of its members, contradicts all those literary enterprises that
help the politically grounded concept of Croatian “minority” evolve into
marginality in the topographic texture of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
Both authors share a prominent susceptibility to the doctrinal discourse of
the literature of their day, by displaying the whole gamut of micro and
macrostylistic devices to disrupt the realistic novel norm, such as elipses,
litotes, antitheses, and ironic insights. In Kovaþiü’s novel U registraturi
the monologous passages and epistolary excerpts blend the late realism
with modernist tendencies. They cling to their multiple narrative
geographies at odds with the narratives reverberating across the actual
Eurocentric geopolitical parameters (for instance, the protectiveness of the
British literary market at the time guaranteed the prevalent form of the
Bildungsroman a uniformity of structure). Such attempts at configuring the
authentic, personalized topographies of locality, or “the elevation of the
peripheral over the central” (Kiberd 1995: 491) reinforce the meaning of
space as a constituent agent of cultural history.
Hardy and Kovaþiü seek to employ the fictional landscape of

incertitude and mutability, akin to the sensations and urges of their
characters. One of the structural premises of the Bildungsroman, the
metaphor of a journey after one’s self-recognition (correlative to the extent
of adjustment to the restraints of the body collective) gives way to the
figure of downscaling (extenuatio, or meiosis) of the effect of such a
predictable journey. “The major theme of the European Bildungsroman—
failure” (Moretti 2000: 216) is set off by the congruent spatial narrative
figure.
The margin and the centre, having been the main spatial coordinates of
the British narrative perspective up to George Meredith’s novel The
Ordeal of Richard Ferevel (1854) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872)
acquired the quality of aesthetic-ethical values in the novels of Hardy,
dissolving the apparent discrepancy between the stagnant British periphery
and the pluralistic, multifaceted centre, or the national capital.
The Croatian cultural condition in the late nineteenth century is
significantly ambivalent because of the simultaneous uplifting of literary
production and education (the foundation of The Academy of Science and
Arts in 1867 and Zagreb University in 1874) and economic and political
colonization. Discarding August Šenoa’s endeavours to fictionalize the
processes of national and social turmoil in the symbolic form of the
historical novel, Ante Kovaþiü belongs with the new generation of
Croatian realists keen on capturing the rift in Croatian national and social
identity. He manages to corroborate the experience of transition from the
margin to the centre (the national capital of Zagreb, or diverse European
metropoles) and the adjustment to the small town circumstance with the
transitory, hybrid novelistic forms evocative of the properties of the
generic European Bildungsroman, as well as of the satirical, sentimental,
naturalist and regional fiction of the epoch. Only thus could he encompass
the dissonances of Croatian locality that he deemed a consequence of
developmental discontinuity and of the spread of mental stereotypes
originating in the nineteenth century, notably the logocentric divisions into
major and minor literatures.
The concepts of the liminal and the central are contained within his
multidimensional novelistic achievement whose universal, modernist,
transregional range has been belatedly recognized by the critics. To
Kovaþiü, marginality happens to be a multiply connotative spiritual
category transferrable from the centre to the margin and vice versa. In his
novel Meÿu žabari the small town setting derives from the rivalry between
the moderates advocating domestic authenticity and the members of the
Progressive party ready to ingratiate with the wielders of power. The
112 Chapter Five
narrative takes on the form of a local chronicle written by the magistrate

Petrus de Kimavac (the very metonymy of his name Peter The Yes Man
suggests the fundamental nineteenth-century tension between inertia and
progress). The provincial chronicle allows Kovaþiü’s persona to flaunt
every instance of social behaviour of the locality. The mannerisms of the
Croatian periphery hyperbolised to the extent of a grotesque uncover the
province as the space of a fickle, impressionable philistine mentality. The
social aberrations of the kind relate to an unstable identity, a fruit of the
nineteenth-century categorical division between centre and margin.
The structure of Kovaþiü’s novel U registraturi, issued in monthly
numbers in the magazine Vienac in 1888, is inseparable from its spatial
dimension, accounted for in the characters’ traversing from the rural to the
urban spatial totality and vice versa. In the same way as the time of
Kovaþiü’s narrative betrays the principles of causality through numerous
elipses and accelerations, the fictional space leading from the country to
the city thrives on the interchangeable array of fragments and protagonists’
impressions. Ivo Frangeš, a renowned Croatian critic and literary historian
pinpoints Kovaþiü’s resorting to temporal elipses as the first reference to
his modernism, the flaubertesque principle of artistic competence and
independence:
“His reflections on literature (as well as his implementation of the same)

make him excel his novelistic peers. He was smothered in the straits of the
narrow-minded environment and unfavourable circumstance. Had he
belonged to a major literature, and worked under better conditions, he
would have excelled even the greatest luminaries of modern narrative art.”
(Frangeš 1985: 646)
The hero’s transition from the Croatian inland landscape (which stands
out as the anticipatory element of his plight) to the stratified spatial plane
of his master Illustrissimus’s manor house (used to fix his social position)
denotes Kovaþiü’s denial of the Bildungsroman’s principles of gradation,
linearity and finiteness. The alternation of spatial categories is triggered by
Ivica Kiþmanoviü and Laura, the bearers of unstable identities restrained
by the commitment to a family, community, or by the prescriptive gender
roles. Their respective identities lend themselves to delineation just along
the borderline between the country and the city. While Ivica Kiþmanoviü’s
duality gets its full spectre in the margin-centre interspace, the portrayal of
Laura infringes on the semantic field of the fairy tale and fantasy, the
transliminal spacetime made up of literary recollections (femme fatale) and
functions (the overreacher and also initiator of the plot).
Kovaþiü’s treatment of the urban landscape strikes a chord with the like
manouvres of Balzac (The Lost Illusions) in that he makes the city a
convergent point of diverse Croatian social strata and also the source of
their alienation; accordingly, his Zagreb does not bear any topical
attributes of the hub of national life and the longed-for destination of
social migrants, invariably used in the works of his fellow writers August
Šenoa and Eugen Kumiþiü. For the marginal characters of the novel
(Illustrissimus, chamberlain Juriü alias Žorž, Miha Medoniü) the act of
leaving the country is ultimate, definite and linked to the motivation of
personal and social promotion and accumulation of capital, a narrative
moment which recalls the classic European Bildungsroman.
In this novel Kovaþiü captures the meaning of transition within a
Croatian locality at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries
by translating it into a set of narrative figures of “character, environment
and existence” as classified by the Croatian literary theoretician and
historian Gajo Peleš. According to him fictional space or topography
found constituent to the figures of existence also “undergoes transition,
loses its innermost monolithic singularity and discernible boundaries”
(Peleš 1999: 288-289). Kovaþiü’s narrative tenets do display the unfailing
loyalty to his locality, a kind of commitment elicited by the critic Vincent
Buckley and pertaining to the Irish as “the old Celticist idea of people
foredoomed by landscape and character to an ineffable melancholy”
(Kiberd 1995: 599).
In Kovaþiü’s novel U registraturi the appropriateness of the realistic
novel procedure meant to create a semblance of the nonconflictual
individual and society evolves into a complex narrative structure
signifying the frustration of personal growth. The cleft between the
country and the city is a spatial metaphor used to sustain the thwarted
endeavours of a shattered, displaced personality.
The convergence in the configuring of Thomas Hardy and Ante
Kovaþiü’s fictional topographies demonstrates their resolution to stimulate
the spatial awareness of the bearers of alterity (of the European periphery)
and make them recognize the properties of genuine landscape. The
Croatian novelistic site of the turn of the century delves into limitations of
the Croatian position fixed in the asymmetrical order of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. Exposed to such territorial distribution practices,
Croatian locality gets unambiguously defined, while in the late nineteenth-
century Croatian authors’ spatial morphology it turns into a place of
subdued and transitory identity. Thus Kovaþiü’s microgeographic insights
in the idiosyncrasies of the Croatian landscape intertwine with the generic
114 Chapter Five
references to the geopolitical notion of European margin that has been

invariably attached to this landscape.
Thomas Hardy and Ante Kovaþiü’s congruous perspectives are based
on the principle of the interiorization of fictional space. Their keenness in
observing the paradoxes of reducing genuine places to tropocentric
concepts of urban landscape turned into a significant synergy of the two
representatives of divergent European cultural settings. Hardy’s critics
bore a grudge against his replacing Victorian novel plots by constructing
uncouth, rudimentary plots out of the thematic and spatial scope of the
British Bildungsroman. The consequence of this late-Victorian ostracism
of the artists who reviled the narrative norm was the label of a regional
author pursuing his interest in the life of an English province.
The authors discussed here reacted to the logocentric legacy of
dominant European cultures such as the British and German by retrieving
the meaning of the variety of national cultures out of their geopolitical
boundaries. The objectivized construct of periphery (primarily as the
antipode of the ideologized institution of the metropolis) dissolves into a
subjective, individualized and multi-faceted experience of a locality. The
autonomous narrative topographies do offer a new ethical-aesthetical
parameters out of the expected, deep-rooted polarized moulding of the
realistic novel at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The
sinuous and dispersed periphery develops its iconic meaning in contrast to
metropolitan density and purposefulness. Hardy’s Wessex and Kovaþiü’s
Croatian province (neither city nor country) may be considered, in John
Hillis Miller’s terms as “atopical sites” or the “placeless within:”
“This placeless ‘within’ is within the landscape and within the persons. It
is within each character as the lack which he or she tries to fill. It is within
the other person whom each tries to appropriate in order to fill the lack, but
who never fills it because he or she is only one more incarnation of the
lack within the landscape that the narrator and characters personify.”
(Hillis Miller 1995: 54)
Fictional landscapes re-evaluate not only the meanings of space in

literature but also the meaning of literature in real space because they
ascertain the relation of European literatures beyond ideology-based
assumptions. The fictionalised, aestheticized, or complementary topography
in the late nineteenth–century novelistic production of “minor” literatures
such as the Croatian facilitates our recognition of Croatian authors’ artistic
competence and mastery of defying the sanctioned territorial orders. Only
the deconstruction of geographic and sociological particularity in a
specific narrative mode of limitless sublime topography does guarantee the
supremacy of fantasy over reality. By creating sets of semantically

contingent spatial images inserted in their protagonists’ psychological
maps Hardy and Kovaþiü announce the poetics of modernism. The margin
realized in their novels assumes the status of the urban and rural periphery
whose residents project their longing for the unattainable and the
indefinite.
References
Balzac, H. 1976. Lost Illusions. London: Penguin Classics.
Eliot, G. 1997. Middlemarch. Oxford, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Frangeš, I. 1985. Modernost Ante Kovaþiüa. In Forum XXIV. Book
XLIX. No. 4-5, 637-646. Zagreb.
Hardy,T. [1876] 1994. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Ware, Hertfordshire:
Wordsworth Editions Ltd.
—. [1878] 1995. The Return of the Native. Ware, Hertfordshire:
—. [1891] 1993. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Ware, Hertfordshire:
—. [1895] 1993. Jude the Obscure. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth
Editions Ltd.
Hillis Miller, J. 1995. Topographies. Stanford California: Stanford
University Press.
Kiberd, D. 1995. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation.
London: Jonathan Cape.
Kovaþiü, A. [1886] 2000. Meÿu žabari. Ante Kovaþiü: Izbor iz poezije i
proze. Stoljeüa hrvatske književnosti, edited by Miroslav Šicel Zagreb:
Matica hrvatska.
—. [1888] 2004.U registraturi. Zagreb: Veþernjakova biblioteka.
Meredith, G.1999. The Ordeal of Richar Feverel. London: Penguin
Classics.
Moretti, F. 1999. Atlas of the European Novel 1800 –1900. London, New
York: Verso.
—. 2000. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European
Culture. London, New York: Verso.
Peleš, G. 1999. Interpreting the Novel. Zagreb: ArTresor.
CHAPTER SIX
SPACE AND TIME IN LITERATURE:

WILLIAM FAULKNER AND SOUTHERN
GOTHIC
BILJANA OKLOPýIû
Abstract
The aim of this paper is twofold. The first part of the paper focuses on both
the Southern regionalism and demythologized Southern domestic metaphor
that have contributed to the appearance, development, and preservation of
Southern Gothic as a literary (sub)genre. The second part of the paper
points out how William Faulkner employed the techniques and
methodology of Southern Gothic (spatial and temporal setting, the issue of
race, hurt woman at the narrative center) in the majority of his
Yoknapatawpha novels and short stories.
1. Southern Gothic as literary (sub)genre

It is a well known fact that space and time in literature connote the
setting of a fictional work. A closer look at any better glossary of literary
terms would confirm this statement and offer a sentence, or two, of
additional explanation concerning this issue. One would, for instance,
learn that the spatial and temporal setting of a narrative includes elements
such as the historical time in which the plot takes place, the geographical
location, the historical milieu, as well as the prevailing social, political,
cultural, and perhaps even spiritual attitudes.
An important question arises. What is the point of mentioning, let
alone discussing, terms that represent the basics of literary theory? The
answer is, if indeed it ever has been, not as simple as it might seem. Quite
specifically, this brief theoretical excursus was necessary to introduce the
term of Southern Gothic that occurred as a product, and a result, of the
Space and Time in Literature: William Faulkner and Southern Gothic 117
symbolic transfer in which constituent elements of a narrative have

become the most important determinants of a new literary (sub)genre. The
impetus for this statement can be looked for in the fact that Southern
Gothic has been determined by a certain geographical location (the U. S.
South) and a certain historical period (Southern past).
Southern Gothic stems from “two literary forms of the early nineteenth
century South—the antebellum plantation Gothic and the often graphically
violent absurdities in the humor of the Old Southwest” (Boyd 1994: 42). It
uses Gothic tropes such as (1) the setting in an ancestral house which can
refer not only to a building but also to a family and its genealogy, (2) real
or imagined occult, supernatural or unusual events, and (3) a suffering
woman who discovers a serious secret and, in doing so, subverts Southern
men and women stereotypes (belle, mammy, Confederate woman, tragic
mulatta, Southern gentleman, poor white trash), deconstructs the
plantation and cavalier myth, depicts a clash of cultures, or shows the
demythologized Southern utopia. It is also interesting to note that Southern
Gothic, although grotesque and critical in essence, does not lack an ever-
present nuance of stubborn optimism connoting redemption, salvation, or,
at least, hope. In doing so, Southern Gothic offers an insight into the
inhumanity of Southern society which oppresses or ostracizes
marginalized groups such as African Americans, Native Americans,
women, and homosexuals. The attempts to decipher what is marginalized,
demythologized, or subverted make Southern Gothic somehow
reactionary—it “react[s] against the current ideologies and myths of an era
by emphasizing what has been omitted or overlooked by such ideologies
and myths” (Boyd 1994: 41).
One of the most remarkable features of Southern Gothic is also its
ability to appear and exist in many different subtypes. According to Louis
Palmer, there is “‘family romance’ Gothic” (Palmer 2006/2007: 122),
which is founded on a story of the fall of distinguished Southern houses,
i.e. families, and “‘race romance’ Gothic” (Palmer 2006/2007: 122), which
depicts and criticizes the race issues in the U. S. South. To these he adds
“‘white trash’ Gothic” (Palmer 2006/2007: 122) which is a subtype of
“class romance” Gothic investigating the Southern social structure. Since
this classification seems to cover wider ground than suggested by the
previously mentioned critic, I would like to propose further subtypes of
“class romance” Gothic by virtue of the existence of other class segments
in Southern social structure. They could encompass “planter romance”
Gothic, “cotton snob romance” Gothic, and “Southern Yankee romance”
Gothic as well. Following the same model, and resting on the fact of the
existence of men and women stereotypes in the U. S. South, I would also
118 Chapter Six
like to suggest the classification of Southern Gothic according to sex and

gender which would comprise subtypes such as “belle romance” Gothic,
“tragic mulatta/mulatto romance” Gothic, “Confederate woman romance”
Gothic, and “mammy romance” Gothic.
2. Factors contributing to the development of Southern

Gothic as a literary (sub)genre
Crucial for the reading of Southern Gothic in the context of space and
time in literature is to investigate the circumstances of its appearance,
development, and preservation that, most obviously, rest on both the
ideology of Southern regionalism and the demythologized Southern
utopia. As a possible starting point for an analysis of the ideology of
Southern regionalism, a definition of a region should be considered. If one
defines a region as an historical, social, and cultural product with its own
course of life, then its regionalism centers in norms, codes, discourses,
categories, opinions, and values that are opposite to, or, at least, different
from the mainstream standard. They, in turn, can be discussed from either
a cultural or historical point of view.
When the notion of Southern regional distinctiveness is discussed
through the cultural lens, its discursive space is, for sure, founded on the
manifesto I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition
(1930). The manifesto comparatively contrasted the Southern and
American way of life and expressed this difference by the term Agrarian
vs. Industrial. The authors of the manifesto—John Crow Ransom, Donald
Davidson, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and others—argued that the
U. S. South represented an example of a society where a human being is
more important than a machine. They also asserted that the Southern way
of life—the way of life “based on the family and the land” (Core 1979:
314), could represent the model of the genuine relation between a person
and his/her region. Although Agrarianism elicited different reactions, most
of which concentrated on its separatist character and attempts to revive the
Confederate spirit in the U. S. South, it, however, represented an essential
contribution to the definition of Southern cultural regionalism. Needless to
say, Agrarianism initiated a similar literary movement known as the
Southern Renaissance. The Southern Renaissance, whose most important
representatives are William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Thomas
Wolfe, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Walker
Percy, Tennessee Williams etc., also explored the importance of region
and tradition in a person’s life by focusing on themes such as the burden of
history, patriarchal and conservative culture, and racial issues.
Southern regional distinctiveness has also been approached from a

slightly different perspective, one in which history played an increasing
role. Unlike the rest of the US that participated not only in the “American
dream” of wealth, liberty, success, innocence, and morality but also in the
American myth of invincibility, the U. S. South’s experience did not
center on these myths. This statement rests, to a great extent, on the
relatively non-American experience the U. S. South underwent during its
colonial, antebellum, postbellum, and modern existence. The colonial and
antebellum South, having based its entire economic and social structure on
the institution of slavery, lived deeply ensconced in domestic metaphor—
“the image of a beautifully articulated, patriarchal society in which every
southerner, black or white, male or female, rich or poor, had an
appropriate place and was happy in it” (Scott Firor 1974: 52). Challenges
to this viewpoint began to appear in the second half of the nineteenth
century because slavery, as the social, racial, and economic structure, and
the U.S. South, as both the place and the idea, were perceived as the
opposites of the US and its innocence, morality, and freedom. This
discrepancy between national and regional ideals of wealth, social
structure, and morality resulted in the bloody four-year civil war that the
Confederacy eventually lost. As a consequence, the U. S. South sank
deeper into financial, social, political, and cultural isolation caused not
only “by wide regional discrepancies in living standards, per capita wealth,
per capita income, […] education, health, [and] protection” (Woodward
1960: 17), but also by racial segregation and racial intolerance imposed by
the Jim Crow legislation and reinforced by means of “whiteness” as a
property ideology. All these factors had the lion’s share in the historical
construction of Southern regional distinctiveness and introduced the notion
of the U. S. South as a region burdened and consumed by its history.
The analysis set out in the previous paragraphs would not be complete
without considering the role of the demythologized Southern utopia. The
process of demythologization, as a process in which an event, a person, or
a thing are supposed to be depicted realistically, objectively, and without
any mythical connotations, rests, in the case of the U. S. South, on its
representation as the US’s margin or “other.” The U.S. South was
marginalized, i.e. demythologized, in two phases. The first phase was
“colonization,” economic, invasive, and expansive in nature, transforming
the U. S. South into a supplier of both extremely cheap labor and immense
natural resources.1 The second phase involved cultural and social
1
This is not to say, of course, that the economic “colonization” of the U. S. South
was entirely negative. It brought some positive changes that were reflected in
economic development since a certain share of capital remained in the U. S. South.
120 Chapter Six
marginalization of the U.S. South; it was brought into being by the

depiction of the U.S. South as either nature or woman or slavery. In
comparing the U. S. South to “a society nurtured in nature’s womb”
(Smith M. 1996: 1433) and neglecting the positive sides of such a
comparison, the US emphasized “negative” Southern characteristics such
as a relaxed, comfortable, luxurious way of life and excessive indulgence
in physical pleasures. These were the features that should have justified
the American view of Southerners as morally and physically degenerate
since they separated them from the essentially American ideals of capital,
profit, hard work, industrialization, and, in particular, morality,
conservatism, and chastity. In doing so, the center attempted to prove that
the leisurely and prodigal way of life—a way of life that depended on
nature and was like nature itself—was not efficient in the long term since
it did not rest on the main values of the capitalist, i.e. American society.
Whereas the first demythologizing process used the nature-culture
dichotomy, the second was gender-related. Since this approach occurred
during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the central metaphor, of course,
involved two warring parties. On the one hand, there was the South which,
as the loser in the war, was depicted as a weak, submissive, stubborn
woman; on the other hand, there was the North, which as the winner in the
war, was presented as a possessor of money, power, and voting rights. The
aim of this gender role distribution was at least twofold: not only did it
intend to accuse all Southern men and women of partaking in the war, but
it also attacked and undermined the Southern social system by identifying
the Southern aristocracy with the corruption of normal gender roles. The
corruption of normal gender roles meant both the humiliation of Southern
manhood, which was presented as incapable, unrestrained, cowardly, and
militarily inefficient, and desecration, or rape, of Southern womanhood
since it was the force the Confederacy rested on. In this way, the US
proclaimed what was “natural” and “normal” and claimed the right to
speak uncritically and with bias about the social and political problems of
the time.
Lastly, there was “the peculiar institution”—slavery. As a crucial point
in the demythologization of the U. S. South it opened an immense
discursive space for criticism of Southern racism, Southern inhumanity,
and the Southern economy. Whereas criticism concerning Southern racism
and Southern inhumanity is unquestionable, the attack on the Southern
economy based on slave labor can be mitigated by the fact that
Transportation problems were solved by a reorganized traffic system. Many new

factories and companies doubled and tripled tax income. Many new work places
opened which, with time, bettered living standards in the U. S. South.
the southern states in the last two decades of the antebellum years provided
almost two-thirds of all United States exports, though the South constituted
no more than two fifths of the nation’s population. Since those years were
just the time when the North was entering upon its industrial expansion,
those exports helped pay for the imports essential to the industrialization of
the United States. (Degler 1987: 8)
3. William Faulkner and Southern Gothic

As a Southerner and a writer, William Faulkner could not resist the
influence of his birth-place—he was practically consumed by the space-
time continuum so typical of the region where he was born. He could not
escape the U. S. South, its history, and the impact of that history on the
Southern present. The result was that Faulkner “discovered that […] [his]
own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that
[…] [he] would never live long enough to exhaust it” (Stein 1963: 82).
Faulkner’s fascination with his native “keystone” produced an oeuvre
consisting of eighteen books of novels and short stories published between
1929 and 1962 and divided into two cycles with a six-year break (1942-
1948). The first cycle comprises Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury
(1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932),
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms
(1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942). The second
cycle consists of Intruder in the Dust (1948), Knight’s Gambit (1950),
Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950), Big Woods (1955), Requiem
for a Nun (1951), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers
(1962). Needless to say, each and every of them joins the Southern Gothic
mainstream by their temporal and spatial setting, their depiction of race
issues in the U.S. South, and their focus on a (hurt) woman who discovers
a sinister secret.
3.1 Time in Faulkner’s oeuvre

The embeddedness in time, in particular, in a Southern past, is found as
a continuous thread woven into the fabric of Faulkner’s South. He, as a
Southerner, clings to the well-known model of Southern history that
consisted of three phases—the Old South, the Civil War and
Reconstruction, and the New South. Faulkner’s view of the Old South
does not center, even though he did feel nostalgia for it, on idealization of
the plantation myth or the plantation aristocracy. Instead, he opted for
“moral order—a code of personal dignity, courage, honor and integrity”
(Miller 1963: 204) that, in his opinion, had to be freed from rigid
122 Chapter Six
formalism, unnecessary violence, and the sins of slavery. And despite

some critics who argue that “nowhere in Faulkner’s work is there a
copious and lively image of the Old South” (Howe 1975: 42), it could,
nevertheless, be said that Faulkner “captured wonderfully the sudden
genesis of government and economy on the cotton frontier, a process
driven by land greed and accompanied by no small amount of swindling”
(Doyle 1997: 9).
The next, second, phase in the temporal development of Faulkner’s
South is presented by the Civil War and Reconstruction. Faulkner’s
descriptions of the Civil War are a response both to the Southern military
defeat and the destruction of principles that formed the very being of
Southern society. He was also aware of the fact that the war caused the
instability of labor market, cut off financial and food resources, and
destroyed the economy and traffic system. In response, Faulkner reflected
this situation in the images of his South: Jefferson was burnt down during
the war, the majority of surrounding plantations, including Sartoris’s, were
destroyed, and those that survived had to cope with the lack of money,
food and labor, and with uncultivated and impoverished land. It is also
interesting to note that Faulkner approached the Civil War from a new
perspective, one in which the home front played an increased role. In
Absalom, Absalom!, for instance, Judith Sutpen joined “the other
women—there were wounded in Jefferson then—in the improvised
hospital where […] they cleaned and dressed the self-fouled bodies of
strange injured and dead and made lint of the window curtains and sheets
and linen of the houses in which they had been born” (AA 125-126).2
Judith’s aunt Rosa Coldfield contributed to the war in a different way: she
wrote “the odes to Southern soldiers […] a thousand or more” (AA 83),
whereas Judith’s grandfather Goodhue Coldfield protested against the war:
“he mounted to the attic with his hammer and his handful of nails and
nailed the door behind him and threw the hammer out of the window” (AA
82).
The Civil War was followed by Reconstruction. The U.S. South, as the
loser in the war, faced economic and political breakdown. In much the
same way Faulkner’s South underwent the same experience: the war left
traces on Thomas Sutpen’s and General Compson’s plantations; Thomas
Sutpen did not manage to rebuild his plantation and was forced to open a
shop to survive; General Compson “put the first mortgage on the still
intact square mile to a New England carpet-bagger in ‘66” (Cowley 1977:
2
Subsequent page references for Absalom, Absalom! will be given as AA in
parentheses in the text.
708). Perhaps it would be correct to say that Reconstruction is somehow

the most problematic period in Faulkner’s oeuvre. There are not so many
characters and events depicting it: only the Burdens—grandfather and
grandson both named Calvin, “killed […] over a question of negro voting”
(LA 187)3 because they were “Yankees. Foreigners. Worse than
foreigners: enemies. Carpetbaggers. […] Stirring up the negroes to murder
and rape. […] Threatening white supremacy” (LA 187); and the
Sartorises—Colonel Sartoris, “an ex-slaveholder and Confederate soldier
[…] and a town hero” (LA 187) who “had to kill […] those two carpet
baggers” (Cowley 1977: 168) to prevent an African American, “old Cash
Benbow from becoming United States Marshal” (Cowley 1977: 165).
The third phase in the temporal development of Faulkner’s South is
marked by the New South when, owing to rapid urbanization and
industrialization inspired by the belief that history should be forgotten and
economic development should be paid more attention than politics, race
and class segregation grew even worse. Faulkner’s new South became
home for a class in growth—lawyers, judges, bankers, shop owners. It also
became a refuge for white and black share croppers. Whereas some of
them “were challenging the power of the planters and townspeople, many
were also quietly rising economically and socially, abandoning the
washed-out land and endless drudgery of rural life for opportunities in the
town” (Doyle 1997: 30). One of these innumerous families demonstrating
the need to change their status are Faulkner’s Snopeses. They became the
synonym for the global breakthrough of the white lower class who cared
only for profit and for whom the end justified the means.
3.2 Space in Faulkner’s oeuvre

With his oeuvre, Faulkner has brought into being one more feature of
Southern Gothic for he used a specific geographical location as a spatial
determinant of his novels and short fiction. This special location, a “place
[…] that [is] […] mapped in the imagination as […] [it] actually […] [is]
in space” (Spillers 2004: 549), which houses most of his novels and short
fiction, is Yoknapatawpha County.4 Created upon the model of Faulkner’s
native Lafayette County in Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County is,
according to its “sole owner & proprietor” (AA 384-385) William
Faulkner, located in northern Mississippi between the Tallahatchie River
3
Subsequent page references for Light in August will be given as LA in
4
The map of Yoknapatawpha, together with its acreage and the number of
inhabitants, is given in Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
124 Chapter Six
on the north and the Yoknapatawpha River on the south. Like every other
county, Faulkner’s county has its capital as well. Placed at the intersection
of the roads to Memphis, Mottstown, Sutpen’s Hundred, MacCallum’s
home and Frenchman’s Bend, Yoknapatawpha’s capital Jefferson largely
resembles Faulkner’s Oxford since both towns, fictional and real, share
some common characteristics (the main square with the Confederate
soldier monument, stores on the square, etc.).
Faulkner pursued the history of his Yoknapatawpha as well. In accord
with the dominant American colonial mythology, his county was
populated by the Chickasaw Indian tribe till 1832 when they ceded their
land to the US government and moved to Oklahoma. The white settlers
came to Yoknapatawpha around 1800 and soon it became the home of
many recognizable Faulkner families such as the McCaslins, the
Compsons, the Sartorises, the Snopeses, the Bundrens, the Sutpens, etc.
Further investigation helps to reveal the etymology of the word
Yoknapatawpha: it is of Chickasaw origin and consists of two words:
yocona and petopha meaning split land. Faulkner’s handling of this issue
is, however, different: he interpreted the word Yoknapatawpha as “water
run[ning] slow through flat land” (Blotner 1974: 251).
3.3 Race in Faulkner’s oeuvre

Besides using the space-time continuum expressed by
embeddedness in Southern history and geography, Faulkner’s oeuvre
employs some other elements that are typical and distinctive for the
writers of Southern Gothic. One of them is the determinant of race that, in
Faulkner’s case, was not seen as an essential or biological part of a
person’s identity but rather as a social and economic construct.5 His
oeuvre also follows this principle since it gives way to an idea of guilt and
debt that pursues the Southern concept of race. Faulkner distinguishes
between various kinds of guilt and debt and this “differentiation is
highlighted in his fictional approach to slavery” (Dussere 2001: 40).
Slavery, with the main emphasis on dehumanization and objectification of
human beings, is, for Faulkner, a curse which affected both the land and
the people. As such, it becomes one of the dominant motifs in much of his
fiction. Absalom, Absalom! thus ends with Jim Bond, “the scion, the last
of his [Sutpen’s] race” (AA 376), who comes from a family Sutpen
5
According to Joseph Blotner, Faulkner blamed the undeveloped Southern
economy for discrimination and the bad living conditions of Southern African
Americans.
rejected and forgot because he “found out that his [great grand]mother
was part negro” (AA 355). Similarly, in Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin,
“not only the male descendant but the only and last descendant in the male
line and in the third generation” (GM 256)6, repudiates the inherited land
and money because he feels that “this whole land, the whole South, is
cursed” (GM 278). The curse was started by the first McCaslin who
sexually abused his own mulatta daughter “because she was his property,
[…] because she was old enough and female, […] and [he could] get a
child on her and then dismiss her because she was of an inferior race”
(GM 294). There is also Light in August with Joanna Burden whose family
was killed because they were the civil right activists. Like Ike McCaslin,
she also experiences the entire racial history of the U. S. South as an
inescapable curse which takes the form of “the black man who will be
forever God’s chosen own because He once cursed Him” (LA 191).
Furthermore, Faulkner’s oeuvre seems to offer an insight into the
origin, development, and preservation of racist ideology in the U.S. South.
His Absalom, Absalom! thus demonstrates that racial intolerance is not
something that is genetically inherited but something that is culturally
passed from generation to generation, from man to man. Racism in the
U.S. South, as Faulkner explains it in Sutpen’s example, appears to be a
reward given to the poor whites by the upper class in order to lessen social
inequalities. Whiteness became a common property of poor and rich
whites, united them on some abstract level, and thus generated the false
sense of identification that “surpassed” social and cultural differences.
Identification with the upper class excluded any possibility of
identification with African Americans and opened a discursive space that
justified the right to racial violence and racial intolerance as an act of both
loyalty to their own race and distinction from the black.
3.4 Hurt women in Faulkner’s oeuvre

The debate on William Faulkner as a Southern Gothic writer would not
be complete without considering the role of a woman in it. In “‘being hurt
by a dominant other’—sometimes by a male character, sometimes by the
community at large, and sometimes, unsettlingly enough, by the audience
of the story itself” (Donaldson 1997), women characters in his
Yoknapatawpha novels and short stories join the Gothic mainstream which
always places a hurt woman in the narrative center. Faulkner’s The Sound
6
Subsequent page references for Go Down, Moses will be given as GM in
126 Chapter Six
and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, the Snopes trilogy, Go
Down, Moses, Sanctuary, to mention just a few of them, have at least one
woman character that fits the context. Caddy Compson, for instance, who
is the central figure and the non-present presence of Faulkner’s The Sound
and the Fury, is, in many ways, a hurt heroine who discovers a sinister
secret. In Caddy’s case the revelation of secret is somehow split into two,
encompassing the death of her beloved grandmother Damuddy and the
recognition of woman’s victimization in patriarchal society. Whereas the
first secret focuses primarily upon the personal encounter with the death of
a beloved person and is, therefore, restricted to the private sphere, the
second goes beyond the limits of individual experience and puts emphasis
on the unread and unwritten in the coded matrix of Southern cultural and
social relations. In this sense, Caddy, “although the oldest and bravest of
the Compson children” (Waldron 1993: 471), could neither escape the
gender subordination imposed on women in patriarchal societies, nor
prevent harassment since she is forced to obey her brother Jason who
blackmails her. In being continuously hurt, no matter whether by her
family, the community, or the narrator of the story, Caddy is again and
again placed inside the Gothic myth.
Similarly, in the character of Joanna Burden in Light in August,
Faulkner has brought into being a woman character who, in her attempts to
reveal the inhumanity of race and gender discrimination in the U. S. South,
suffers not only social and cultural humiliation imposed by the community
where she lives, but also physical abuse and eventually a horrible death. In
creating her so, Faulkner opens a discursive space that offers a possibility to
read Joanna Burden as the potential subversive female force in the novel.
This statement finds its confirmation in the fact that Joanna resists the
patriarchal sex categorization that values woman according to her
reproductive and exchange usefulness in the heterosexual matrix. She is
neither a mother who has a reproductive value, nor a virgin who has a pure
exchange value in the marriage market. By refusing to be asexual and to
stay on the pedestal reserved for white upper class Southern women, and “in
being intelligent, opinionated, and single, Joanna violates every aspect of
the local social code for women” (Wittenberg Bryant 1986: 117). Her
female body, which in its resistance to reproduction and asexuality becomes
the symbol of the defeat of the Southern patriarchal ideology of supremacy
of white over black, men over women, superior over inferior, must be
humiliated, silenced, murdered, fitted into the Gothic creative framework
because it threatens to slip out of the prescribed roles for every member of
Southern society.
Faulkner also employed this Gothic feature in a narrative of racial and

gender segregation in his 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!, for at its center is
a woman character who, in many ways, embodies the Gothic heroine—Miss
Rosa Coldfield. For sure, Miss Rosa’s story, which occupies the lion’s share
of the narrative space of Absalom, Absalom! and which is told in the Gothic
manner and in Gothic language, “defines her as some kind of supernatural
being, as ghost or vampire or fury […] and pours her literary consciousness
into ‘writing’ the Sutpen story as an elaborate gothic fiction” (Roberts 1994:
163). In much the same way, Miss Rosa, as a creator of her own Gothic
narrative, introduces herself as a Gothic heroine: she places herself in the
setting of a dark and terrifying castle (Sutpen’s mansion) with the evil
villain (Sutpen) and innocent victims (his entire family), dares into the
unknown, is subjected to Sutpen’s sexual harassment, and discovers the
family secret (Sutpen’s first marriage). As a heroine of her own story, Miss
Rosa “is given authority, at least for a while, not just as the persecuted
maiden but as an inquisitor, interrogating the masculine versions of the
story” (Roberts 1994: 164). And this is, as far as it can be told, Faulkner’s
closest encounter with the convention of a hurt woman in Southern Gothic
fiction.
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Vintage Books.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE NOTIONS/ISSUES OF HISTORY

IN POSTMODERN LITERATURE:
KURT VONNEGUT
LOVORKA GRUIû GRMUŠA
Abstract
This paper offers a postmodern approach to history as viewed through the
perspective of the post-WWII literary generation. Kurt Vonnegut is one of
the postmodern authors who claim that most of history is totalitarian; for
when the historiographer assimilates all particular moments into the time
of universal history, it is assumed that he or she outlines the plot analogous
to nature. This integration ignores the Other—marginal groups and
individuals that have experienced history differently. That is why Vonnegut
and other postmodernists see western domination to forge linear, causal
chains of time as harmful, and prone to explode time’s continuity into
small, unmemorable fragments of “now.”
The same pattern is palpable in other aspects of Vonnegut’s texts. Every
time one of the characters credits a vision of truth, the vision explodes and
the “truth” turns useless or wrong. In spite of the fact that American culture
and domestic policy rest on assumptions that truth is absolute, history is
continuous and causally coherent, the universe is material, and observers
(including presidents, reporters, judges) are objective and reliable,
Vonnegut invokes and ironically inverts the linear/cyclic and binary
teleological models of history. His lenses provide different angles of vision
variously colored by their subjective origins. It seems that Vonnegut
argues that the past—having shaped a dangerous present—can only be
known imaginatively and the most reliable explorer of the past is the one
best able to integrate facts into a living imagined reality—not the historian
but the historically informed artist (as himself).
As a part of our socio-cultural experience, history has acquired a wide

range of references: from a methodical, systematic view of large-scale
social and political developments to the individual act of attributing
130 Chapter Seven
increased significance to a given moment. Full-fledged historical

narratives in particular yield a perspective under which a succession of
events, each procreating the other in a causal continuum, present
themselves as something more than a mere aggregate of occurrences. It is
in human nature to try to endow the world with meaning, which is why
scholars impose a coherent although artificial order upon reality. One of
their operational modes is the historical enterprise, or (re)discovery of
relevant past.
The problem arises because history is articulated in various ways.
Every age demands a history (or a narrative) written from its own
perspective, comprehensible to people who live in it. Historians live and
think in their own time. Some of the assumptions they bring to history
derive from their own culture, some even reflect the particular class, race
or gender to which they belong, and some are politically motivated (Ghani
1993: 56). How the past is articulated in the present has always as much to
do with the present as with the past. Therefore, the past cannot be
recaptured in its totality because the remains of it are incomplete and are
themselves part of the present, so that the past itself is, in this sense,
irredeemably present.
In a postmodern age (a term that in itself implies a break with the past),
the processes of modernization continue and intensify, and with them the
problematic status of history. Postmodernism professes that any work of
history is vulnerable and fallible, and therefore not capable of absolute
truth. It recognizes the deficiency and incompleteness of the historical data
upon which history is based, the selectivity inherent in the writing of
history, the subjectivity of the historian, and the time lapse. Although
postmodernists accept only partial, contingent truths, they do not deny that
the past has happened (if not denying reality altogether), but admit that the
writing of history entails selection and interpretation, (re)creation of
imperfect and partial pasts.
What is curious is that postmodernists, although aware of the biased
perspectives that historians apply, endorse similar practices themselves.
For example, they deliberately exaggerate the contributions of minority
groups in history just to employ “multiculturalism;” the only difference is
that they admit it. Contemporary American historians Joyce Appleby,
Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob point out the controversies about historical
enterprise detected in American school textbooks and the measures which
were taken to “solve” the dilemma:
“Critics have scrutinized the textbooks available for every level of

education and found them Eurocentric, racist, sexist, and homophobic.
They celebrate the achievements, it is alleged, of dead white European
The Notions/Issues of History in Postmodern Literature: Kurt Vonnegut 131
males rather than showing the contributions of women, minorities, gays, or

the oppressed and excluded groups. They reinforce the worst racial and
sexual stereotypes rather than helping children and young people to see
beyond them. Whole new teams of writers have been hired to produce
histories with perspectives thought to be more in tune with the values of a
socially diverse society.” (Appleby 1997: 212)
As the quotation shows, contemporary intellectuals question fixed

categories previously endorsed (mostly white male upper-class experience
and Western dominance), and are encouraged to construct records of
diverse peoples and histories based upon group, gender, and ethnic
identities. They condemn the interests served by particular histories, but
forget that they are a group themselves and instruct certain, also subjective
practices. These methods include destroying anything that might be
logocentric, repudiating previously valued works (the rhetoric of the
Enlightenment), rejecting the discipline of knowledge, rationality, and
authority, and approaching the abyss of nihilism. The truth is that history
always excludes somebody, even though postmodernists strive to find the
truth usable by all people.
Like most postmodernists, Kurt Vonnegut scrutinizes the conventions
of traditional history, exposing it to criticism (Slaughterhouse-Five,
Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions), sharing the postmodern belief
that even the critical history aspired to in modernism belongs to the
antiquated remnants of nineteenth-century positivism. Once there was a
narrative of national history that most Americans believed a part of their
heritage; now there is a pervasive lack of confidence in universal
objectivity. This is shown in Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions
where he undermines national history, committing to pluralistic values and
the complex realities of American past. The narrator in the story states that
the founding fathers of the American nation were “the sea pirates” (10)
and aristocrats who “concealed great crimes” (10) and “were meaner than
anybody else […] heartless and greedy” (12). He furthermore ridicules the
American national heritage and displays a historical perspective of
America based on discrimination, where “color is everything” (11),
Indians were slaughtered and African-Americans brought to the continent
in chains:
“1492/The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was
discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were
already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was
simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them
[…] Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of
the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for
132 Chapter Seven
machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was

embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary
human beings as machines.” (10-11)
This is obviously an exaggerated response to the uncritical glorification of

American history and worshiping of its victors (no matter how immoral
they may have been). It is also one of the perspectives of what history
looks like to those who have found themselves marginalized and excluded
from grand narratives so far. Even though Vonnegut has exaggerated in
identifying the founding fathers as pirates and racists, he has broadened
the historical identity of the American past and put an emphasis on
difference and marginality that have always been a part of American
society. Drawing the readers’ attention to the “hurts” of the past out of
which real history is made, he questions the authenticity of American
standard history.
There seems to be a new kind of skepticism about truth, not only in
history but also in the natural sciences, appearing to grow out of the
twentieth century scientific discoveries (the theory of relativity, quantum
mechanics, chaos theory). This relativism is supported by the insistent
democratization of society (American in particular) where everything is
questionable and the truth depends on the observer’s standpoint. Thereof,
in history (as we have seen in Vonnegut’s “founding fathers” story),
postmodernism amounts to a denial of the fixity and reality of the past
apart from what the historian chooses to make of it, and thus to
renunciation of one objective truth about it. It seems that postmodern
history recognizes no reality principle in a traditional sense; it is
relativistic, almost a history at the pleasure of the historian, for
discontinuity, disruption and fragmentation incorporate our reality. History
itself is rhetorical, aesthetic, and a literary creation. This is why
postmodernism celebrates otherness, contradiction, indeterminacy,
paradox, and aporia of any kind, applauding the research that has laid the
foundations for a multicultural approach to human history.
The history depicted in Vonnegut’s novels reveals reality as a profusion
of entangled events, many of which are forever lost without a point of
reference. Conscious of the deficiencies both of the historian and the
historical record, acutely aware of the ambiguous relationship between
past and present, the author, apart from recycling narrative historical
records, relied on his own memories and created a particular vision of
WWII. In his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut chooses an event
verified by his personal experience: the fire-bombing of Dresden
(February 13-14, 1945), when 135,000 people were killed, and which he
survived as a prisoner of war in the basement of a slaughterhouse. But
being a witness to the devastation of Dresden is of little help in his attempt

to give it meaning and literary shape, specifically because official military
reports, historical narratives, and memories of other survivors did not quite
match his own. Hence, he created a unique his-story, mixing his own facts
with authentic historical data, invoking some documents, such as The
Destruction of Dresden, by David Irving, Dresden, History, Stage and
Gallery, by Mary Endell, and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds, by Charles Mackay, LL.D. These narratives offer
various perspectives and imageries of Dresden and of human nature,
raising not only intellectual and aesthetic questions, but moral issues too.
The ethical and the epistemological dimensions of the postmodern debate
display their unavoidable link here, diminishing the possibility of an
authentic historical view.
Vonnegut’s views of the Dresden catastrophe differ from the detached
historical narratives he encounters (though some of them may have valid
foundations). He cannot recollect the bombing in tranquility, which he
believes is available only to those who were on the side of the perpetrators
and who succeeded in deriving some sense even from such a past event.
The author is here hinting at the high ranking American officers, such as
Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, U.S.A.F., who insisted on the necessity
of the firebombing, and Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, R.A.F., who
talked about unfortunate coincidences that resulted in a tragedy. Both
authorities insisted the catastrophe be viewed in the context of even more
massive slaughters wrought by the Germans. Opposed to these rational
explanations, Vonnegut believes that history cannot be narrated as a
meaningful and chronological process. This is typical of many other
postmodern novels, such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow that
describes the same pivotal moment of modern history: World War Two,
whose brutality and importance for the future course of events must be
made sense of. But like Vonnegut, Pynchon refuses to do so, which does
not entail a refusal to acknowledge the impact of these events—for their
novels are full of devastating images of war, destruction, and
victimization—undisturbed in their own dimension and intensity; visions
that simply throw the readers into the face of historical events while
undermining any attempt to analyze these events (Kunow 1989: 195).
Sense-making of such pain and suffering kept Vonnegut continually
frustrated, and yet he had to put it on paper to illuminate the present for the
future generations to understand and not to repeat the mistakes of their
ancestors. When he finally wrote the novel it was an anti-war novel whose
senselessness actually made sense of the topic.
134 Chapter Seven
A blatant example of such an emphatic moment in the novel (a

remembrance of an event) takes place twenty years after the war.
Vonnegut’s anti-hero Billy Pilgrim, while listening to a Barbershop
Quartet, suddenly feels ill. In one of his rare conscious moments (for most
of the time he is disoriented), he discovers that the gestures of the
musicians remind him of four German guards in the slaughterhouse
basement during the Dresden firestorm:
“There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-
explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a
very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower
of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed
carcasses were down there, and nobody else […]
The guards drew together instinctively, rolled their eyes. They
experimented with one expression and then another, said nothing, though
their mouths were often open. They looked like a silent film of a
barbershop quartet.” (129-130)
The guards were certainly aware that their comrades, friends and families
were above, exposed to the horrific destruction. As Walter Hölbling states:
“What remains in the narrator’s memory is the quality of the
inconceivable, illustrated by a few momentary images that are
simultaneous in time to the inconceivable event—here the images of the
eye-rolling and speech-less guards” (Hölbling 2003: 300). Even though the
quoted description is not a part of an authentic historical narrative (it is
more likely an original traumatic experience), it seems to tell us more
about the impact of the Dresden catastrophe than history books, at least
when emotions are in question. Although yielding no understanding of the
inconceivable event, it is somehow more real than the traditional historical
explanation that textbooks offer.
This lack of explanation and meaning, or as Christopher Lasch has
identified it: “the waning of the sense of historical time” (qtd in Kunow
1989: 184), is one of the main reasons of the cultural crises in postmodern
society. The loss of the sense of historical continuity—the sense of
belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and
stretching into the future—has caused an emergence of various
psychological and pathological personality disorders in humankind. The
incoherence of meaning and history, the loss of the ability to make sense
of the temporal continuum, is intensified by the emergence of the will to
survive, which is not just a problem in war situations (such is the case with
Billy), but also in the everyday postmodern culture of technology and the
enormous speed-up in the existential rhythm.
A perfect metaphor of how survival just exists in the present, and

history is meaningless, is made visible in Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos.
The novel features seal-like people who survive by catching fish
barehanded, for they are equipped with flippers, beaks and no hands, using
their only weapons/tools—their teeth. In this pursuit of the prey “they also
run the risk of being devoured themselves by sharks, thus taking up their
own place in the food chain” (Mustazza 1994: 282). The primary business
of these “large molecules” (as Vonnegut names them) is survival. Due to
their diminished brains they are unable to pass laws, comprehend religion,
wage wars, or cherish history. After nine months of childhood they even
forget who their mothers were. Free of any psychological problems, these
mammals that have no names nor histories to tell, live happy, innocent,
and peaceful lives. Neither agonizing over death, nor having the capacity
to fear it beforehand, they live in harmony with nature, just as animals do,
using their present-oriented survival instincts. As Darwin himself
suggests, and whose evolutionary ideas Vonnegut exploits:
“When we reflect on this struggle [for existence], we may console

ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no
fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the
healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.” (Darwin 2000: 60)
This is exactly how the fictitious folk on Santa Rosalia dwell, living for
the moment, unaware of their past or what the future might bring.
The Second World War is one of the historical events which people
survived rather than understood, and which is a background for a number
of American war novels, such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Kurt
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Mother Night (1961),
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). These authors emphasize
human alienation in history and war’s sheer brutality and purposelessness.
Their novels display a record of human suffering and death. Since these
novels treat historical issues, another topic has to be confronted, namely,
that of the historical novel and its relation to history. Although there is a
valid argument that postmodern novels in general have little in common
with traditional historical novels, a number of American war novels appear
as “descendants” of the historical novel. They trace and recreate historical
events just as traditional historical novels did, only in their own, unique,
postmodern way, using historiographic metafiction, self-consciously
distorting what we know as “history: right and proper.”
The historical novel—as it has evolved from Sir Walter Scott to the
flourishing industry of today—has never challenged traditional history, for
it has been understood as a form of fiction and not fictional history
136 Chapter Seven
(Himmelfarb 1997: 165). It is now in the postmodern age that history itself
gets “textualized” and deconstructed. While events and persons are
transformed into “texts,” the past is deprived of reality and history of truth.
The distinction between history and fiction is effaced and fictional history
becomes a form of history rather than fiction. As Terry Eagleton explains:
“History, in short, is ‘textualised,’ its chronology modernistically disrupted,
its linear segments stacked spatially together”1 (Eagleton 1989: 279).
Records, archives, history books, and monuments that remain as
landmarks of history, although already processed historical data, keep
serving as sources for new, fresher visions of his-stories to be told. What
historians do is try to get the story “straight,” which assumes that there is a
story out there waiting to be resurrected and that this story can be
truthfully narrated as long as they use the right (empiricist-realist)
methods. Paul Ricoeur has pointed out that narrative is a basic human way
of making sense of the temporality of human existence (Ricoeur 1984: 3).
Historians themselves have become increasingly aware of narrative as a
basic operational mode of history over the past three decades
(simultaneously with, but quite independently of literary postmodernism).
Theodore Zeldin is one of the first historians who launched a serious
assault upon traditional history, calling it “narrative history,” which
depends on such arbitrary concepts as causality, chronology, and
collectivity (Himmelfarb 1997: 161). Dominik LaCapra deconstructed
chronology and claimed that for the historian the very reconstruction of a
“context” or a “reality” takes place on the basis of “textualized” reminders
of the past, which means that all definitions of reality are implicated in
textual processes (LaCapra 1990: 27). La Capra also gives credit to the
leading postmodernist philosopher of history, Heyden White, and says:
“No one in this country at the present time has done more to wake
historians from their dogmatic slumber than has Hayden White” (LaCapra
1990: 72). He agrees with White’s critique of conventional narrative and
of a narrow documentary approach as inadequate to the tasks of
intellectual history. Among other things, White has revealed that historical
inquiry is undertaken for the purposes of a group or culture, which tries to
1
In his article, Terry Eagleton analyzes history and narrative from the Marxist
perspective, rejecting both the traditional historicist view that the past is always
recoverable and the newer “textualist” view that history is merely a text and the
past thereof indeterminate. But he agrees with some of the features of these views
(as the quote shows), insisting that history is linear, cannot be undone and the past
should be used to instruct and reconstitute the sense of the present and thereby
affect the future.
determine what certain events mean for them and for their present and
future.
This juncture of meaning and narrative in history is made obvious in
postmodern historical metafiction, but it is also subverted. In Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow history is told not
as a single story but manifold stories, seen from different angles in a
narrative that is non-chronological, not bound to cause and effect
sequences, constantly defying narrative closure. Slaughterhouse-Five
blends history and fantasy, combining some historical accounts of WWII,
personal reminiscences and unsubstantiated anecdotes of the author with
fictional inconsistencies, blurring reality by constant disruption of the
temporal order and science-fictional episodes. There are recognizable
segments of historical experiences in postmodern narratives (parts of
Gravity’s Rainbow are documentarily accurate to an extraordinary degree,
mixing impossible events among its historical details), but they resist
systematization, and offer conclusions that are provisional and
hypothetical, always liable to be overturned by yet another interpretation.
Postmodernists claim that every representation of historical phenomena
abounds in relativity as the consequence of the function of the language
used to describe and thereby constitute past events as possible objects of
clarification and understanding. The dispute arises because narrative “is
regarded as a natural ‘container’ of historical fact, a mode of discourse
‘naturally’ suited to representing historical events directly” (White 1997:
392). Historical events supposedly contain “‘real’ or ‘lived’ stories, which
have only to be uncovered or extracted from the evidence and displayed
before the reader to have their truth recognized immediately and
intuitively” (White 1973: 6). What Hayden White means by this is that
language imposes a limited choice of forms, emplotments, ideological
positions and explicative models which determine the specificity of
various interpretations of historical events, and that full-fledged historical
narratives are products of selected, partial pasts and therefore subjective
interpretations. The postmodern approach to history implies no objective
outside criterion to establish that one particular interpretation is truer than
another. All of history, in this view, is aesthetic and philosophic, its only
meaning being that which the historian/author chooses to give it, in accord
with her or his own sensibility and disposition.
Vonnegut, as one of the authors who had tried to reveal some truths
about history, specifically about World War II, seems to imply that the
novelist is a better historian than the journalist, merging subjective
reaction and objective documentation, blending fact and fancy, and
succeeding in raising many questions as to what history is. His specific
138 Chapter Seven
notion of history is revealed through two perspectives of the Dresden raid:

the highly personal recollections of the event, and the detached, distant
view of history (Reed 1972: 187). The latter is conveyed through already
mentioned historical documents and accounts of American officials, but it
is also introduced through an ancient story in the account of the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah the author reads about in the Bible.
He suggests “Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known.
The world was better off without them” (16). The Biblical account serves
as a precedent for Dresden annihilation suggesting that the city was
destroyed in righteous wrath (just like Sodom and Gomorrah), for its
people belonged to the German race that devastated many European cities
and obliterated millions of people. But Vonnegut obviously does not
justify the massive destruction of the open city and the deaths of its
citizens. Just like Lot’s wife, he turns back with compassion and looks to
where people and their homes had been. Like Lot’s wife he has become
immobilized by sorrow and his novel stands for remembrance that such
horrors may not be repeated (unfortunately people are exposed to such
monstrous destructions daily in various corners of the world). His parallel
of God’s punishment of the immoral cities and with the Allies’ bombing
of the immoral nation serves to make a point that the cruelest of deeds are
done in the best of causes.
The author—although wishing to instruct future generations not to
repeat the atrocities of WWII—is at the same time aware that there will
always be destruction and wars. Therefore, Billy who was a victim in
WWII forgets “the hideous things he himself had seen bombing do” (44),
and agrees with a major in the Marines who said he was in favor “of
bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone Age” (43). Vonnegut also
mentions President Truman’s announcement of the atom-bombing of
Hiroshima, who argues that it was necessary to save civilization from the
destruction wreaked by the Japanese. This kind of morality leads to
justification of disasters and deaths in Dresden, Hiroshima and Vietnam,
demonstrating even a certain pride in man’s ability to obliterate anybody
who “deserves” it. As Howard Campbell, a character in Vonnegut’s
Mother Night states:
“‘There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,’ I said, ‘but no good
reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty
Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man
that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s
that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.’ ‘It’s
that part of an imbecile,’ I said, ‘that punishes, and vilifies and makes war
gladly.’” (181)
Vonnegut wrote more about the ethical dimensions of the Hiroshima

catastrophe in his novel Cat’s Cradle. In Galapagos (1985), he narrates
the long-run consequences of the bombing, which in this case turned out to
be positive. One of the characters, Akiko, a girl who was born with a “fine,
silky pelt like a fur seal’s” (58) (due to the radiation her mother was
exposed to in Hiroshima), was the mother of the future seal-like humanity,
and her generic mutation secured the survival and easier adaptation of the
race in its new locus of operation. In all of these novels Vonnegut implies
that human beings will always be engaged in wars, destruction and
atrocities because exposed forever to the merciless forces of history
(unless their brains shrink and they become incapable of demolition, as the
humans in Galapagos do).
Vonnegut and his counter-part clown Billy Pilgrim (Slaughterhouse-
Five) agree that people are “the listless playthings of enormous forces”
(119), while Manichean characters like good Derby and evil Lazzaro are
introduced to strengthen this philosophy. Recurrent phrases, such as “Poo-
tee-weet?” (birds singing) and “So it goes,” signal nature’s indifference to
humans and the characters’ helplessness in war and resignation to death.
Recurrence itself signifies the eternal circle and repetition of past times, of
history.
The subtitle of Slaughterhouse-Five, “The Children’s Crusade” is in
accordance with this philosophy, pointing at soldiers as mere pawns, with
Vonnegut’s representative Billy, a universal man-child, who like the rest
of his unit could neither understand nor resist the unyielding forces of
history. Billy is characterized as frail of stature, an utterly helpless,
clumsy, childlike, and ridiculous soldier, weeping silently, dozing off into
time travel, grinning foolishly at Germans who abuse him. He avoids
memories of horrors he had witnessed, yet his past keeps haunting him, his
subconscious keeps sending him back to the prison camp and war
episodes. His youth and that of other American soldiers surfaces when the
colonel who commands the British prisoners makes the point explicit.
Seeing them shaved and cleaned, the colonel realizes how young they are:
“My God, my God […] It’s the Children’s Crusade” (77). Throughout the
novel Vonnegut underlines this imagery of men at war as children. From
the very beginning Mary O’Hare insists that men like to give war an aura
of glamour, as a masculine, John Wayne-type of activity, whereas in fact it
is fought by babies (11). Different perspectives to historical events are
negotiated here: a film industry that insists on patriotic fervor, masculinity
and heroism, and on the other hand individuals (like Vonnegut) that
experienced war and see it as useless and fought by inexperienced youth.
The analogy with the historical Children’s Crusade (1213) is obvious,
140 Chapter Seven
recalling 30,000 children who marched to Marseilles, half of whom died

of cold and hunger and were sold into slavery, drawing the conclusion that
children died needlessly for somebody else’s interests. Vonnegut is here
also hinting at the Vietnam war and the inexperienced boys who were
fighting that war while he was writing the novel: “And every day my
Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in
Vietnam” (154). The problem of historical authenticity is magnified
through this perspective, for propaganda and journalists gave different
reports of the dead, while those that returned from Indochina claimed so
many more had died.
Deliberately challenging the notion that history can be retrieved and
made sense of only by objective investigation, Vonnegut mixes fact with
fantasy and creates fabulated histories. In his novel Cat’s Cradle (1963)
two central events—the nuclear bomb explosion in Hiroshima (historical
event) and the freezing of the world (fictional event)—reflect each other.
The second mirrors the first one, but the relation of the factual and
fictional seems reversed. That is, the historical dropping of the nuclear
bomb (fact) and the life of its inventor Felix Hoenikker (fiction), which are
both presented in the narrative as facts, are only indirectly accessible to the
narrator and he has to rely on various witnesses. On the other hand, the
fictitious event: the freezing of all waters which only few individuals
survive, appears as a factual report witnessed by the narrator Jonah
himself. Vonnegut draws our attention to fabulation which in the first,
detached but factual story appears after the events, distorting the truth of
the historical record. In the second, witnessed history, fabulation seems to
be there before, shaping events. In both cases fabulation stands in the way
of the truth (as White argues).
The author experiences with this dichotomy of fact and fiction, illusion
and reality, lies and truth in his third novel Mother Night (1961), only
without science fiction conventions. He describes the life of a fictitious
character Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American writer and spy who
broadcasted Nazi propaganda in Germany. Faced with the pressures of
Nazi Germany, Cambell retreats to art and to love. Both are two traditional
ways of coping with the chaos of the outside world, but in this case they
got manipulated into cruel absurdities.2 His love for Helga and their ideal
world A Nation of Two (a play he always meant to write) become the
sources of discrimination which supported by his artistic imagination
2
The intimate diary of Howard’s life with Helga is plagiarized and made into
pornography in the novel..
turned into some of the most vulgar anti-Semitic propaganda (Olderman

1972: 210).
One of the central themes in this novel is Campbell’s historical role.
Even though he thought he was rather passive and detached from reality
(in his flight to art and love), at the end he realizes he exercised an
enormous power, and his speeches, containing coded messages for the
Allies (whose meaning and purpose was unknown to him) actually
invigorated Nazism. He was too good at the propaganda, turning his art to
documents full of hatred: “he was one of the most vicious sons of bitches
who ever lived” (138). When Campbell meets his American contact after
WWII he is informed that only few people knew about his secret activity:
“‘Three people in all the world knew me for what I was’—I said. ‘And all
the rest’—I shrugged. ‘They knew you for what you were, too,’ he said
abruptly” (138). Here Campbell realizes the bitter truth which is also the
moral of the novel: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful
about what we pretend to be” (V). The double standards of his historical
role are obvious: although acquitted in court and found not guilty for
instigating Nazism because he was working for the Allies, he is aware of
the moral implications of his deeds and is willing to accept the
responsibility (unlike Adolph Eichmann whom he meets in jail). He
realizes his acts cannot be excused because committed for the good of his
country, for he should answer to human beings and not causes. His double
identity and guilt are revealed in the following passage, which is an
account of his father in law, a high-ranking German officer who hated him
and suspected Campbell was a spy but did nothing:
“‘because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served
us,’ he said. ‘I realized that almost all ideas that I hold now, that make me
unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi came not from
Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler—but from you.’ He took my
hand. ‘You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone
insane.’” (80-81)
Concluding the discussion, I want to stress the importance of history

for Vonnegut, weather it be viewed as irreversible (Slaughterhouse-Five),
cyclical (Timequake), recycling (Cat’s Cradle), or unattainable and
ambiguous (Mother Night), it is real. What is specific for Vonnegut and
the postmodern authors is that they approach history and truth in the
dimensions of experience beyond the factual and documentary. Their
history is a plural discourse which can always produce any number of
alternative accounts, hidden in layers of various processes into some of
which they can have closer insights, and some of which cannot be reached.
142 Chapter Seven
Their notion of history is unique for it remains open even though closed
within the boundaries of the past.
References
Appleby, J., L. Hunt and M. Jacob. 1997. Telling the truth about history.
In The Postmodern History Reader, edited by Keith Jenkins, 209-218.
London/New York: Routledge.
Darwin, C. [1859] 2000. Postanak vrsta: putem prirodnog odabira ili
oþuvanje povlaštenih rasa u borbi za život. Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak.
Eagleton, T. 1989. History, Narrative and Marxism. In Reading Narrative:
Form, Ethics, Ideology, edited by J. Phelan, 272-281. Columbia: Ohio
State University Press.
Ghani, A. 1993 Space as an arena of represented practices: an
interlocutor’s response to David Harvey’s ‘From space to place and
back again.’ In Mapping the Futures, edited by J Bird et al., 47-58.
London: Routledge.
Heller, J. 1961. Catch-22. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Himmelfarb, G. 1997. Telling it as you like it: postmodernist history and
the flight from fact. In The Postmodern History Reader, edited by K.
Jenkins, 158-174. London/New York: Routledge.
Hölbling, W. 2003. Chronology and Its Discontent: History and Fiction in
U.S. Postmodern Writing. In (Mis)Understanding Postmodernism and
Fictions of Politics, Politics of Fiction, edited by M. Peprnik and M.
Sweney, 291-302. Olomouc: Palacky University Press.
Kunow, R. 1989. Making Sense of History: The Sense of the Past in
Postmodern Times. In Making Sense: The Role of the Reader in
Contemporary American Fiction, American Studies, A Monograph
Series, edited by G. Hoffmann, Vol. 68., 169-97. München: Wilhelm
Fink Verlag.
LaCapra, D. 1990. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts,
Language. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.
Mustazza, L. 1994. A Darwinian Eden: Science and Myth in Kurt
Vonnegut’s Galapagos. In The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut,
edited by L. Mustazza, 279-286. Westport—Connecticut/London:
Greenwood Press.
Olderman, R. 1972. Beyond The Waste Land: A Study of The American
Novel in The Nineteen-sixties. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press.
Pynchon, T. 1973. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: The Viking Press.
Reed, P. 1972. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Warner Books, Inc., University of

Minnesota.
Ricoeur, P. 1984. Time and Narrative. Volume 1. Chicago/London: The
Vonnegut, K. [1961] 1966. Mother Night. New York: Dell.
—. [1963] 1988. Cat’s Cradle. London: Penguin Books.
—. [1969] 1991. Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty
Dance with Death. Berkshire: Vintage.
—. [1973] 1991. Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday. New
York: Dell.
—. [1985] 1990. Galapagos: Roman. Translated by M. Suško. Zagreb:
Grafiþki zavod Hrvatske.
—. 1997. Timequake. London: Jonathan Cape.
White, H. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-
century Europe. Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
—. 1997. Historical emplotment and the problem of truth. In The
Postmodern History Reader, edited by K. Jenkins, 392-396.
London/New York: Routledge.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TRANSIT SPACE, TRANSIT TIME:

TERRORISM IN POSTCOLONIAL FICTION
PIA BRÎNZEU
Abstract
The paper discusses the transit space and time of the post-postcolonial
period, determined by a unification of divergent tendencies through
globalization and through the sustained effort to cope with the new threats
of terrorism. While postcolonialism relates spaces and places to nations
and past history, emphasizing the distinction between “central” and
“marginal” regions, post-postcolonialism maps the world in a new way,
according to the presence of evil. Space loses its main characteristics,
reduced by terrorism into a topos common to all countries. Only the desire
to resacralize places can save humanity, as has been exemplified by
Penelope Lively, Giles Foden, Christopher Wakling, and John Fullerton.
Since the 1930’s, when M. M. Bakhtin defined the chronotope as “a

center for concretizing representation, a force giving body to the entire
novel” (2007: 250), and since the 1960’s, when Eudora Welty considered
location as “the ground-conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief
and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course” (1968:
259), a lot has been written about how every narrative delimits spatial and
temporal conditions for its own existence, how the chronotope is forged in
the telling of the story, and how all the novel’s abstract elements—
philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and
effect—gravitate towards it.
Postcolonialism, with its insistence on marginal nations, has developed
its own chronotope, based on the fact that nations tell themselves in
making connections between indicators of space (often arbitrary borders)
and indicators of time (stories, events, episodes, moments), while
restricting the space-time relationship to the more limited place-past
relationship. This is illustrated by the authors of the famous book The
Transit Space, Transit Time: Terrorism in Postcolonial Fiction 145
Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 1989: 2), who consider
that postcolonialism expresses the “rationale of the grouping in a common
past”. To Edward Said (1994: 4), it appears obvious that the way in which
the postcolonial countries understand, formulate or represent their past
shapes the understanding and interpretation of the present.
Postcolonialism has, thus, renewed its interest in the collective memory
of different countries, in which past events have been reconstructed,
maintained, modified, and endowed with political meanings. The art of
memory has become something for the modern world (both for historians
as well as for ordinary citizens and institutions) to be used, misused, and
exploited in its concern with a specifically desirable and recoverable past,
being subject to an inventive reordering and redeploying. Place
experiences have been necessarily time-deepened and memory-qualified,
and space has been transformed into a more specific place, with its own
history. The relation with the past makes places highly diverse in their
nature and traditions, so that while places may be “other” from the
colonizers’ point of view, they are also different one from another.
Moreover, the postcolonial struggle over geography and the fight to
control land produces disruptures and discontinuous associations,
overlappings of the colonizer’s and the colonized’s territories, which,
together with the deterritorialization caused by exile, develop a chronotope
of “nowhere” and “never” (Said 1994: 358). Accordingly, the fragmentation
and disruption of space creates an increasing uncertainty about what we
mean by “places” and how we relate to them. This is amplified by the fact
that, as Doreen Massey has clearly demonstrated, spatiality and
temporality are never really passive: they are processes which cause
specific forms of interaction, noticeable in the dialectical interplay
between experience, perception and imagination in place construction, as
well as in the relations between distanciation, appropriation, domination,
and production of places (1993: 66-67). Thus, when related to the past,
postcolonialism appears as a space and time of transit, of territorial and
ethnic hybridities, specificities, and multiplicities.
Is this transitoriness preserved when turning towards the future? The
answer is yes, it is preserved, but in a different way. Completely new
tendencies, especially those of homogenization, are to be noticed in what
could be called the present post-postcolonial period. Due to globalization,
similar patterns of production and consumption connect time and space to
money, to capitalism and its developments. Most disparate parts of the
planet are linked, and the most varied lifestyles, manners, and mentalities
are associated. What Harvey calls time-space compression (1990: 201-
308) eliminates spatial barriers and changes space relations among things,
146 Chapter Eight
while social relations are stretched out in a process referred to by Giddens

as time-space distanciation (1991: 21).
However, there are two new negative issues of globalization which
have not yet been sufficiently analyzed: environmental catastrophism and
terrorism. Both have a direct influence on representations of space.
Whether caused by suicide bombers or tornados, the voluntary or
involuntary destruction of places, followed by disaster and death, oblige us
to reconsider the specificity of space/place from the viewpoint of
penetrability and vulnerability. These new aspects of the post-postcolonial
period homogenize places even if they remain differentiated by internal
specificities. Moreover, space has so far been considered a transparent
notion, “infinitely knowable” (Lefebvre 1991: 28), with all its parts
penetrated by geographical visions, by the gaze of the scientists who look,
see, and understand all. Now terrorism highlights the dangerous and
unexpected evil, resident in every possible corner of the planet. Neither
central nor marginal, evil is irritatingly unabsorbable and non-integrative
into the geography of a transparent space.
The opaqueness generated by the impossibility to “see” the seeds of
evil is amplified by the difficulties which plague the definition and
delineation of political terrorism. The term is loaded with assumptions
sometimes formulated as “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom
fighter” and it is often laden by pejorative connotations, in part, because of
the way “terrorism” has been employed by politicians and the popular
media. Ambiguity reigns supreme in the qualifications associated with the
two opposing groups, of “us” and “them.” If we take the 9.11 case as an
example, the entire Western world has seen those terrorists as forces of
evil, of hell, of anti-Christ. However, in one of Osama Bin Laden’s
speeches, the Americans appear as the ones who “are trying to repeat the
horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted
blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and
devastation” (2004: 411). In a similar way, in Christopher Wakling’s
novel, Beneath the Diamond Sky (2004), the Kashmiri nationalist forces
dream of a free, democratic, independent country. They announce in a
manifesto given to the British prisoners that they desire a state “with no
divisions” (308). Are they right or not?
In This Green Land, John Fullerton (2005) tells the story of Reem
Najjar, a trained terrorist and a suicide bomber, based on a real model,
Saana Mheidly, the first woman volunteer to lay down her life in an attack
on occupation forces in South Lebanon in April 1985. When reading
Fullerton’s novel, one does not really grasp the frame of reference, one
cannot say what terrorism is or what the final goal of terrorism is. Reem’s
family and her home have been destroyed, she has lost everything and is
therefore ready to become a terrorist. Is Reem right or not? Is she a victim
or a victimizer? Here a complicated problem appears, that of the ethics of
terrorism, where neither a personal nor a cultural position is of any help.
What individuals think about their acts may or may not be correct,
depending on the position taken, and what a culture thinks about an act
again may or may not be correct. Whose position is to be adopted then? In
conventional Western accounts of terrorism, only terrorism by nonstate
groups or US-government-defined “rogue states” is counted. What then
about terrorism by dominant states, especially the United States? On the
other hand, can acts of marginalised groups be justified when they are so
weak that no response other than armed action against civilians has a
chance? Is it enough to say that if people are intentionally killed and their
property destroyed terrorist acts are for sure ethically wrong?
Ambiguity also affects the presentation of the places where terrorist
attacks happen. If we compare the following two examples from Giles
Foden’s The Last King of Scotland and John Fullerton’s This Green Land,
we realize that they are both similar to what happened on 9.11. Foden’s
hero, Nick Garrigan, describes a terrorist attack in Idi Amin’s Uganda:
“The whole place smelt of burned flesh, and the whole place was smashed.
Rubble and broken glass littered the pavements, and the tiled roofs of
buildings—caved in and hanging at precarious angles—were curved into
strangely beautiful, fragmented shapes. Below, among the piled bodies,
dogs and chickens sniffed and scratched.” (289)
Fullerton’s hero offers a similar perspective:
“Nick stayed where he was. He listened to the debris tapping at the

windows like a hundred hungry fingers. The frames shook violently in the
aftershock, and he was thankful for the anti-blast curtains. […] Pieces of
hot metal and oddly shaped bits of molten glass crunched underfoot. He
wrinkled his nose at the sharp stench of burning. […] He watched the
smoke. At first it was a balloon of dark venomous muck over to the left. It
expanded fast, filling the sky. It boiled into a thick, vertical column above
the surrounding buildings, propelled upwards from the point of origin. It
moved vertically with great rapidity, volcanic in its power. It changed
colour from black to grey and white. The column thinned into a stalk of
smoke, grew taller, then flattened at the top to form a cloud. The wind bent
the plume of smoke and carried the cloud over the city.” (238-39)
The two descriptions could be swapped without affecting the novels too
much. Moreover, intelligence and security officers, politicians and resistance
148 Chapter Eight
fighters, Christians and Muslims, Westerners and Arabs, indistinguishably

become part of the same group, that of victims threatened by unexpected
terrorist attacks. Evil has been transformed into a unifying factor. The
world is no longer divided as it was before into “the centre” and “the
periphery.” Whether representing the centre or the periphery of the planet,
whether in London, Madrid or Tripoli, places are reduced to an
undifferentiated setting for terrorist acts. As a consequence, what Eudora
Welty states, that “every story would be another story, and unrecognizable
as art, if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else”
(1968: 254), is no longer true. The world of terrorism allows the swapping
of places without significant alterations.
In novels dealing with kidnapped persons, the situation is even worse.
Spaces become undistinguishable spots, because heroes are kept in small
cells, totally isolated from the outside world. In Penelope Lively’s
Cleopatra’s Sister or Christopher Wakling’s Beneath the Diamond Sky,
space is reduced to a few square meters and its specificity is totally
annihilated.
In Cleopatra’s Sister, the spatial coordinates are related to Marsopolis,
the imaginary capital of an imaginary country, Callimbia, situated between
Egypt and Libya. Terrorists kidnap the passengers of a plane supposed to
fly to Namibia, with the intention of holding them hostage until the British
Government agrees to repatriate the Callimbian dissidents who have taken
refuge in London. The passengers face evil in one of its most terrifying
variants. The spatial coordinates are irrelevant. Only a few sentences
describe the landscape of Callimbia, seen while the passengers are taken to
some barracks not far from the airport: “the landscape was flat, with a
distant grey smudge of hills. There were fields of sugar cane, beans, and
the occasional patch of olives or orange trees” (148). In Marsopolis, Lucy
Faulkner, the main heroine of the novel, notices only that “as the city
thickened around them the disheveled appearance of the place became
more and more pronounced,” and that the landscape is reduced to a few
details only: “an overturned bus; debris of bricks and stones on the road;
buildings with broken windows” (148). Although unable to perceive a
detailed landscape, Lucy realizes that there is a clear distinction between
her personal frame of reference and “the unreliable, alternative universe
beyond it, whose codes were impenetrable and intentions obscure” (196).
Time and space become “dual torments” to her, they have moved
“imperceptibly into a different frame of reference,” into a transit
chronotope.
Christopher Wakling’s novel, Beneath the Diamond Sky, describes
seven Westerners on a trekking expedition being taken hostages by
separatist militants in Kashmir. Two of them are killed. The novel does not
really deal with the landscapes of Kashmir, a region administered by India,
Pakistan, and China, and disputed between Moslems, Hindus, and
Buddhists. The novel focuses on two of the hostages, Kate and Ethan, a
British couple, whose relationship develops under extreme pressure and
becomes the core of the story. In an interview with Wakling (2005), Frank
Bures, editor of World Hum, calls Beneath the Diamond Sky “a travel
novel,” although Kashmir is not described at all. This is strange because
there are only a few glimpses of the Himalaya mountains given early in
the novel when, before being kidnapped, Kate has a wonderful view of the
mountain peaks. Their description is reduced to the following paragraph
only:
“Three hundred and sixty degrees of sky, bent like a bubble above the
peaks. Kate spun slowly on her heel in the snow, trying to fix the view in
her head. There were clumps of dark-green firs in the depths, grey tongues
of scree stretching to the snowline, then a brilliant glare reaching upwards,
overlain here and there with blue shadows, pocked with dents and
boulders, the distant line of their progress fragmenting to individual tracks,
then single footsteps, tracing the laborious hike, all the way up, here. Silver
mountains at eye level in every direction, an endless disorientation of
steepness. This was what they had come for; it was magnificent.” (73)
This wide perspective of the sky is replaced later by a barred patch of

blue, seen through the cell window. It is accompanied by the unpleasant
smells of the cell and by the sounds of a distanced reality: they can only
hear how “a mule brays” (252) and can only see how the “gusts of
powdery snow blow through the window gap from time to time” (268).
Even the natives are represented only by a few soldiers, the prisoners’
guards. Still, “beneath the surface there is always a welter of activity”
(259), as one of Kate’s family friends comments. The whole world is
united around the prisoners, taking position against the terrorists, and thus
the reduced space of the prison cell comprises, in fact, a larger universe.
Still, the chronotope remains poorly described and too general to be of any
interest whatsoever.
Thus Lively’s Callimbia, Wakling’s Kashmir, or Foden’s Uganda stand
for a space of archetypal evil, underdevelopment, and totalitarianism. The
specificity of these places has disappeared behind the prison walls. Space
is seriously limited, rendered inauthentic and colourless. But this has
serious consequences, since space/place is a fundamental aspect of man’s
existence in the world, a source of security and identity for individuals and
groups of people. According to Heidegger, unsettled by the way in which
150 Chapter Eight
all things are lumped together into uniformity by globalized

distancelessness, the place is the “locus of Being” (1971: 165). If we lose
this capacity of experiencing, creating and maintaining significant places,
Heidegger says, then we lose our roots and find ourselves cut off from all
sources of spiritual nourishment. This sounds even more frightening when
related to Eco’s worry, that the archetypal forms of malevolence can never
be eradicated, since they are a fundamental part of human reality, that they
are forms of “primordial fascism” which surround us always, even if
“transvestite” or working mysteriously, without motivation and logic
(1995-96: 21). However, salvation may be offered by a political vision
based on the correct understanding of rootedness, on a deep commitment
to place, and on the resacralization of the inhabited territories. Writers
seem to have felt the necessity of imagining a different geography of the
future, a geography of spirituality which should no longer be a transit
space.
There are two aspects to be noticed here. One is the truism that a space
of spirituality can be created only when the inner space is correlated to the
outer one. Doris Lessing has emphasized the point:
“I see inner space and outer space as reflections of each other. I don’t see
them in opposition. Just as we are investigating subatomic particles and the
outer limits of the planetary system—the large and the small
simultaneously—so the inner and the outer are connected.” (qtd. in
Hazelton 1982: 6)
The second aspect emphasizes the importance of one’s individuality

through free association with other people across the surface of the earth.
An intense awareness of the qualities of a place within which temporal
experiences unfold is possible only when we recognize the material and
emotional connections that exist between us and the millions of other
people who have had a direct or indirect role in making our existence
possible every moment.
Discovering the spirituality of a place by focusing oneself on love and
beauty represents a powerful process, frequently described by writers.
Eudora Welty considers that “from the dawn of man’s imagination, place
has enshrined the spirit; as soon as man stopped wandering and stood still
and looked about him, he found a god in that place; and from then on that
was where the god abided and spoke from if ever he spoke” (1968: 254).
Penelope Lively stresses the important moment in Lucy’s evolution, when
her feelings transcend selfishness and switch to the people of Callimbia,
perceived as victims of a mad dictator, who suffer more than she does
because they are tortured, brought to the lowest forms of moral
degradation, and killed. Thus they are no longer perceived as strangers. To

her surprise, Lucy experiences communion with the invisible people of
Callimbia and feels subtly strengthened by the empathy and outrage
developed in her loving heart.
As shown elsewhere (Brînzeu 2000: 161), the sense of plenitude which
invades Lucy’s soul opens the doors of her prison and annihilates its
impenetrable walls. Brought back to the first barrack-like building where
the hostages were sheltered upon their arrival, Lucy realizes that her
voyage of initiation has come to an end. Whether she will be set free or
killed is no longer relevant. She has learned a lot about loving a larger life,
the life of those that are beyond her. And it is in this ultimate choice that
she finds the power to defeat the ominous threat of terrorism and death.
Thus, even if evil cannot be stopped, it can be minimized and restrained
from destructiveness by manifestations of sympathy and love. Lucy
transforms her deconstructed womanhood into a civilizing process.
Beyond a tragic physical and moral condition, she develops a new feeling
of community, mutual understanding, and loyalty, feelings that she has not
been aware of outside prison. This brings us to the paradoxical conclusion
that prison annihilates racism, xenophobia, and suspicion, developing a
solidarity with the unassimilated Otherness that is stronger than any
voracious power relations or desires to torture and kill. America has
proved it after 9.11.
A similar revelation is experienced by Clay, one of Wakling’s
kidnapped heroes who understands that before being imprisoned by
terrorists he was totally indifferent to his British colleagues working at the
school where he was teaching: “we were strangers,” he says, “brothers and
sisters in name alone, talking to one another through inch-thick glass”
(263). He feels he has to go beyond the thick glass of his selfishness in
order to become a better human being. He does it hoping that some day
things will cease to be done “in the usual way,” and that our collective
post-postcolonialism will indeed be replaced by a universal multicultural
polycentrism, in which all are equal in understanding the benefic energies
of goodness penetrating real and fictional spaces.
References
Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths, H. Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back.
London: Routledge.
Bakhtin, M. M. 2007. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M.
Bakhtin, translated by C. Emerson & M. Holquist. Austin: University
of Texas Press.
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Bin Laden, O. 2004. Jihad against Jews and Crusaders. In Voices of

Terror: Manifestos, Writings and Manuals of Al Qaeda, Hamas, and
Other Terrorists from around the World and throughout the Ages,
edited by W. Laqueur, 410-412. Naperville, Illinois: Reed Press.
Brînzeu, P. 2000. Corridors of Mirrors: The Spirit of Europe in
contemporary British and American Fiction. Lanham, Maryland:
University Press of America.
Bures, F. 2005. Interview with Christopher Wakling.
http://www.worldhum.com/qanda/item/christopher_wakling_beneath_t
he _ diamond_sky_20051019/.
Eco, U. 1995-6. Fascismul primordial (Primordial Fascism). România
literară, XXVIII (51-52): 21.
Foden, G. 1998. The Last King of Scotland. London: Faber and Faber.
Fullerton, J. 2005. This Green Land. London: Pan Books.
Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Harvey, D. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Hazelton, L. 1982. Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism and ‘Space
Fiction.’ The New York Times, July 25.
www.nytimes. com/books/99/01/10/specials/lessing-space.html.
Heidegger, M. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper and
Row.
Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space.Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Lively, P. 1993. Cleopatra’s Sister. New York: Harper Perennial.
Massey, D. 1993. Power geometry and a progressive sense of place. In
Mapping the futures: local culture, global change, edited by J. Bird et
al., 59-69. London, New York: Routledge.
Said, E. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.
Wakling, C. 2004. Beneath the Diamond Sky. London: Picador.
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by S. K. Kumar and K. McKean, 249-266. New York: McGraw-Hill.
CONTRIBUTORS
Marija M. Brala Vukanoviü completed her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Applied

Linguistics at the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, the
University of Cambridge, U.K. She is currently Associate Professor at the
English Dept. of the University of Rijeka, Croatia, where she teaches
General Linguistics, General Semantics and Pragmatics, and Cognitive
Semantics. She also teaches Translation and Interpreting at the University
of Trieste, Italy. Her current research interests include the language-space
relationship, and the culture-language-identity relationship (focusing on
pedagogical implications). Maja Brala is the author of over twenty articles
on cross-linguistic coding (prepositional and prefixal semantics),
bilingualism, language and identity, and translation studies, a textbook in
General Linguistics (Understanding Language, UniRi Academic Books),
and co-editor of the journal Views and Voices. Inquiries into the English
Language and Literature.
Pia Brînzeu is Full Professor of English Literature, Vice-Rector at the

University of Timiúoara, Romania, and former Chair of the Romanian
Society for English and American Studies. She has published books on
literary and semiotic issues (Corridors of Mirrors: Postwall British and
Romanian Fiction, University Press of America, 2000; Translating the
Body, Lincom, Munich, 2008) and a number of articles on narratology in
Semiotica, Degres, and Poetics. She is currently working on a book about
Renaissance drama.
Sintija ýuljat is Lecturer at the English Department at the Faculty of

Philosophy, University of Rijeka. She has published a number of papers in
various Croatian journals, such as Književna smotra and Rijeþ, and
translated poetry and children’s literature. Her main research interests
include comparative literature, intertextuality, the impact and reception of
Victorian literature, and literary translation.
Lovorka Gruiü Grmuša is Research Assistant at the English Department

of the University of Rijeka. She is the author of a number of articles that
appeared in English Text Construction, Views & Voices, Fluminensia,
Glasje, Novi izraz, Književni kontekst. Her main research interests
154 Contributors
comprise all aspects of temporality and postmodern American literature.

Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2005/06 at the University of
California, Los Angeles, she wrote her dissertation about “Temporality in
American Postmodern Literature: Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover,”
and is currently working on a book project about Thomas Pynchon and his
latest novel Against the Day.
Maya Hickmann received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago

(1982). She was appointed as Researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (1982-1992), then at the French CNRS
(Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in several laboratories of
the University René Descartes in Paris: Laboratoire de Psychologie
Expérimentale (1992-1996), Laboratoire Cognition et Développement
(1996-2005), Laboratoire Cognition et Comportement (2005-2006). She is
presently Research Director at the CNRS and co-directs the laboratory
Structures Formelles du Langage at the University of Paris 8. Her research
focuses on first language acquisition, and more recently on bilinguism and
second language acquisition, with particular attention to structural vs.
functional determinants, to universal vs. language-specific constraints, and
to the relation between language and cognition in development. Many of
her past publications were devoted to discourse development (Hickmann &
Schneider, First Language 1993; Hickmann, Kail & Roland, First Language
1995; Hickmann, Hendriks, Roland & Liang, J. of Child Language 1996;
Hickmann & Hendriks, J. of Child Language 1999; Hickmann, in Strömqvist
& Verhoeven (eds.), Erlbaum 2003; Hickmann & Schneider, in Perkins &
Howard (eds.), Kluwer/Plenum 2000; Hickmann, Cambridge University
Press 2003). Her more recent research focuses on typological constraints
on spatial cognition (Hickmann & Hendriks, First Language 2006;
Hickmann, Taranne & Bonnet, J. of Child Language 2008; Hendriks,
Hickmann & Demagny, AILE 2008; Hickmann, Hendriks & Champaud, in
Guo et al. (eds), Erlbaum 2008). She also edited or co-edited a number of
volumes on language acquisition (Academic Press, 1987; CNRS Editions,
2008) and on crosslinguistic approaches to space in language and
cognition (Benjamins, 2006, 2007).
Henriëtte P. J. M. Hendriks obtained a Masters degree in Sinology and

Linguistics (1986), and a PhD in Psycholinguistics at Leiden University in
1993, and an HDR at Paris 8 (2003). She worked as a student assistant,
research associate and staff member at the Max Planck Institute in
Nijmegen for 12 years. She has been working at Cambridge University
since 1998 and is currently Acting Director of the Research Centre for
Space and Time in Language and Literature 155
English and Applied Linguistics. Dr. Hendriks is also currently Guest

Professor at the Beijing Foreign Studies University (BeiWai) and an
associate member of the CNRS laboratory (UMR 7023) entitled Structures
Formelles du Langage. Previous and ongoing projects and co-operations
have led to an extensive number of publications. Recent publications
include Hendriks, Hickmann & Demagny (2008) How English native
speakers learn to express caused motion in English and French. In:
Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Étrangère, 27; Gullberg, Hendriks,
& Hickmann (2008), Learning to talk and gesture about motion in French.
In: First Language, 28; Hickmann, & Hendriks (2006), Static and dynamic
location in French and English. In: First Language, 26; Hickmann,
Hendriks and Champaud (2009) Typological constraints on Motion in
French and English Child Language. In: Guo et al. (Eds). Crosslinguistic
Approaches to the Psychology of Language: Research in the Tradition of
Dan Slobin; and The Structure of Learner Varieties. Edited Volume.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 2005. Her principal interest in
psycholinguistics is in the interaction between language and cognition and
language and culture. Research questions arising deal with the influence of
language-specific differences on first- and second-language acquisition,
and the effects of cognitive maturity on the acquisition process.
Yinglin Ji is a PhD student at the Research Centre for English and

Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. Her academic
interests include first and second language acquisition and literary
stylistics. Recent publications include Ji, Y. (2007). Reference to space in
Chinese and English poster descriptions. In CamLing 2007 Proceedings,
Cambridge: Cambridge Institute of Language Research, and Ji, Y. & Shen,
D. (2005). Transitivity, indirection and redemption in Sheila Watson’s The
Double Hook. Style 39 (3): 348-362.
Biljana Oklopþiü is Research Assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy in

Osijek. She specializes in Faulkner studies as well as Tennessee Williams,
female Gothic, genealogical novel, and stereotypes in literature and
popular culture. Her articles have appeared in Književna smotra,
Fluminensia, Književna revija, Neohelicon, Americana, Ubiq, Middle
Ground, and other journals. As a postdoctoral Fulbright scholar at UNC at
Chapel Hill she is currently working on a study of Southern men
stereotypes in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels and short
stories.
156 Contributors
Laure Sarda is a researcher at CNRS, in the laboratory Lattice (UMR

8094 CNRS & Ecole Normale Supérieur - Ulm), France. She is co-editor
of the journal Discours. Her research interests include space semantics,
transitivity and discourse structure. Her main publications focus on the
topics of transitive motion verbs, fictive motion verbs, grammaticalization
and evolution of spatial adverbials and spatial prepositions, initial
positioning of adverbials and their impact on discourse structure
Dejan Stosic is lecturer of General and French Linguistics at Artois

University (Arras, France) and a board member of the French Cognitive
Linguistics Association (AFLiCo). His main fields of research include
space semantics in French and Serbian, fictive motion in language and
cognition, the relation between language and human spatial cognition. He
has published many papers and book chapters on the semantics of dynamic
spatial prepositions expressing path relations in French and Serbian, on
different types of locative predicates in a cross-linguistic perspective as
well as on the manner of motion verbs and on the categorization of spatial
entities in language and cognition (The Prepositions ‘par’ and ‘à travers’
and the Categorization of Spatial Entities in French, in Aurnague,
Hickmann & Vieu (Eds) (2007), John Benjamins; The semantics of space :
A study of the prefix pro- in Serbian, in Delbecque & Cornillie (Eds)
(2007), Mouton de Gruyter). He is also co-editor of one book and two
journal issues.
INDEX OF NAMES
Ameka, F. & Levinson, S. 40, 45 Ghani, A. 130

Anderson, R. W. 89 Giddens, A. 146
Anderson, R. W. & Shirai, Y. 88, 89 Goldin-Meadow, S. 3
Annamalai, E. 92 Griffiths, G. 145
Appleby, J. 130-131 Grinevald, C. 40, 45
Arden, A. H. 93 Gumperz, J. & Levinson, S. 3
Ashcroft, B. 145 Hardy, T. 12, 104-115
Bakhtin, M. M. 9-16, 144 Harvey, D. 14, 145
Balzac, H. 113 Hazelton, L. 150
Bin Laden O. 146 Heidegger, M. 149
Blotner, J. 124 Heller, J. 135
Bloom, P et. Al. 3 Herskovits, A. 63
Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. 6, 66 Hickmann, M. & Hendriks, H. 25,
Bowerman, M. & Pederson, E. 66, 27
67, 73 Hillis Miller, J. 114
Boyd, M. 117 Himmelfarb, G. 136
Brînzeu, P. 151 Hölbling, W. 134
Brown, R. 88 Holquist, M. 10
Buckley, V. 113 Holt, J. 90
Bures, F. 149 Howe, I. 122
Bujas, Ž. 73 Hunt, L. 130
CHILDES 26 Jacob, M. 130
Comrie, B. 90 Jameson, F. 15
Core, G. 118 Kiberd, D. 109, 110, 113
Cowley, M. 122 Kopecka, A. 40
Darwin, C. 135 Kothandaraman, P. 91
Degler, C. 121 Kovaþiü, A. 11, 12, 104-115
Dercon, C. 11 Kumiþiü, E. 113
Donaldson, S. 125 Kunow, R. 133, 134
Doyle, D. 122, 123 LaCapra, D. 136
Dussere, E. 124 Langacker, R.W. 51
Eagleton, T. 136 Lasch, C. 134
Eco, U. 150 Lefebvre, H. 146
Eliot, G. 111 Lehmann, T. 91, 92
Faulkner, W. 12, 13, 121-127 Lemmens, M. 40, 45, 50
Foden, G. 144-151 Lessing, D. 150
Frangeš, I. 112 Levin, B. & Pinker, S. 63
Fullerton, J. 144-151 Levinson, S. and Wilkins, D. 6, 40,
Gentner, D. 3 45
158 Index of Names
Li, C. and Thompson, S. 29, 30 Scott, W. 135

Li, P. 39, 97 Shirai, Y and Andersen, R. W. 89
Lively, P. 144-151 Shirai, Y. 88
Ma, Z. 30 Siliü, J. & Pranjkoviü, I. 72
MacWhinney, B. 26 Slobin, D. 6, 24, 25, 33, 42, 63
Massey, D. 145 Slobin. D. and Welsh, C. 97
Matlock, T. 51 Smith, C. 89, 90
Matlock, T. and Richardson, D.C. Smith, M. 120
51, 55, 57 Spillers, H. 123
Matsumoto, Y. 51 Stein, J. 121
Meredith, G. 111 Stephany, U. 88
Miller, D. 121 Šariü, LJ. 81
Moretti, F. 107, 111 Šenoa, A. 111, 113
Mustazza, L. 135 Talmy, L. 6, 23, 24, 27, 42, 51, 62,
Newman, J. 40, 45 63, 66
Olderman, R. 141 Tiffin, H. 145
Palmer, L. 117 Vandeloise, C. 64, 68, 69, 80
Peleš, G. 113 Vendler, Z. 89
Pynchon, T. 133, 135, 137 Virilio, P. 11
Reed, P. 138 Vonnegut, K. 14, 15, 129-141
Ricoeur, P. 9, 136 Wakling, C. 144-151
Roberts, D. 127 Waldron, K. 126
Saeed, J. 89 Welty, E. 144, 148, 150
Said, E. 15, 145 White, H. 16, 136, 137
Sayer, A. 15 Wittenberg Bryant, J. 126
Schiffman, H. F. 91, 99 Woodward, V. 119
Schopenhauer, A. 106 Zeldin, T. 136
Scott Firor, A. 119

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Space and Time in Language and Literature

Space and Time in Language and Literature

Marija Brala Vukanoviü

This book first published 2009

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN (10): 1-4438-0567-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0567-4

List of Tables and Figures ......................................................................... vii

List of Abbreviations................................................................................ viii

PART I: Space and Time in Language

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 39

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 61

PART II: Space and Time in Literature

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 104

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 116

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 129

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 144

Index of Names........................................................................................ 157

The overall expression of information components in Chinese, English

ACC Accusative case

We also wish to acknowledge the kind support of Carol Koulikourdi and

Marija Brala Vukanoviü

CAPTURING SPACE AND TIME:

MARIJA BRALA VUKANOVIû

least some elements of “language universality” vs. “language variability”,

1.1. Space and time in language

syntactic) categorization of space and time in natural languages?, and b) is

x How is the conceptual relationship between spatial and

depend upon prelinguistic spatio-temporal schematisations

Answers to these questions are very important not just in themselves,

aspects in detail: the expression of the Cause component; the devices

explored from the cognitive perspective, and its analysis grounded in

1.2. Space and time in literature

As we know, different types of reality have unfolded since the

even present). The strength of Oklopþiü’s approach is the persuasive

1.3. Conclusive remarks

Choi, S., McDonough, L., Bowerman, M. & Mandler, J.M. 1999.

SPACE AND TIME IN LANGUAGE

TYPOLOGICAL ISSUES REGARDING

HENRIËTTE HENDRIKS, YINGLIN JI,

French main verbs usually encode 1 or 2 components with Path

languages). Other languages typically express the path information in

(1) Nei-ge xiao houzi pa-xia-lai le.

Thus, in this example pa indicates the manner of ascending, i.e., by using

A problem with Talmy’s analysis is, however, that whereas satellites

(2) Ranhou ta xia-lai le.

Otherwise said, the V2 and V3 in Chinese do not have a similar syntactic

2. Caused Motion in Chinese, English and French

This paper uses the methodology developed by Hickmann and

target. The target was selected according to previously established criteria.

Selection of components refers to the specific information components

3.1. The Selection of Information Components

subjects in all three languages compared (Chinese 96%, English 98%,

3.2. Devices Used to Express the Selected Information

The RVC (Resultative Verbal Compound) is a construction in Chinese,

‘directional RVCs’, in which V1 is a verb of action causing the direct

Further, Types of Path expressed in Chinese RVCs differ in semantic

3.3. The Density of Information in Chinese, English, and French

depending on the specific construction adopted. For instance, in Chinese,

(7) a. Hopi ba qiu tui xia shan.

3.4. Summary of the Results

4. Discussion and Concluding Remarks

use of the ba construction) whilst Path is expressed outside the verb; on