Surveying the Role of Mental Spaces Theory in Eliminating Semantic Anomaly & Referential Ambiguities

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
Arsalan Golfam 1
Sepide Abdolkarimi 2
1 Faculty member, department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, Tarbiat Modares University
2 Ph.D. Student in Linguistics, Tarbiat Modares University
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to explain the concept of mental space and the relationship between mental spaces and metonymy and the role of this theory in eliminating semantic anomaly and referential ambiguities. The space-maker linguistic elements will also be introduced in this paper. The authors, as native speakers of Persian who have a good command of English and German and familiar with French have used their intuitions in gathering data. They have checked the correctness of French data by consulting with other speakers of French. Findings of this survey showed that different moods of the verb, changing predicates and diectics are examples of linguistic elements which serve as space makers whose existence in languages is the representation of mental spaces and this representation in its own turn, is the reflection of the same mental mechanism in human beings in linguistic codification and a proof for considering cognitive universals in linguistic analysis.

Keywords

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Pazand Quarterly
Volume 6, 22-23 - Serial Number 22
Special issue: cognitive linguistics
Autumn 2010
Pages 65-78