On the metaphorization of space: a closer look at the English far from X-construction and its Polish equivalents

Although a fair share of scholarly attention has been paid to the metaphorically driven grammaticalization of the originally spatial English far from X-construction into a minimizer, whereby it emphatically points to the subject’s non-attainment of a given property or failure to enter a specific eventuality, little has been written about whether, and how, this change finds reflection in the translation of English texts into foreign languages, including Polish. Thus, on the basis of a random sample composed of sentences containing the English far from X-construction along with their respective Polish translations extracted from the parallel English-Polish Paralela Corpus, this paper sets out to examine how the grammaticalized English expression is typically rendered into Polish. Considering the variation observed in the data, five main translation categories have been identified, namely those involving (i) spatial markers, (ii) standard minimizers, (iii) simple negation, (iv) omission, and (v) other locutions. The results of the empirical analysis indicate that in slightly more than half of the cases, the metaphorical English construction is translated into Polish with the use of non-spatial expressions, in particular canonical minimizers, a finding which can be accounted for in terms of the fact that the Polish spatial counterparts of far from X have generally undergone a lower degree of grammaticalization.

The semantics and pragmatics of Amharic spatial expressions

Dissertation Abstract

Characterization of zebrafish GABAA receptor subunits

Abstractγ-Aminobutyric acid (GABA), the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, exerts its effect through the activation of GABA receptors. GABAA receptors are ligand-gated chloride channels composed of five subunit proteins. Mammals have 19 different GABAA receptor subunits (α1–6, β1–3, γ1–3, δ, ε, π, θ, and ρ1–3), the physiological properties of which have been assayed by electrophysiology. However, the evolutionary conservation of the physiological characteristics of diverged GABAA receptor subunits remains unclear. Zebrafish have 23 subunits (α1, α2a, α2b, α3–5, α6a, α6b, β1–4, γ1–3, δ, π, ζ, ρ1, ρ2a, ρ2b, ρ3a, and ρ3b), but the electrophysiological properties of these subunits have not been explored. In this study, we cloned the coding sequences for zebrafish GABAA receptor subunits and investigated their expression patterns in larval zebrafish by whole-mount in situ hybridization. We also performed electrophysiological recordings of GABA-evoked currents from Xenopus oocytes injected with one or multiple zebrafish GABAA receptor subunit cRNAs and calculated the half-maximal effective concentrations (EC50s) for each. Our results revealed the spatial expressions and electrophysiological GABA sensitivities of zebrafish GABAA receptors, suggesting that the properties of GABAA receptor subunits are conserved among vertebrates.

Why Gayborhoods Matter: The Street Empirics of Urban Sexualities

Urbanists have developed an extensive set of propositions about why gay neighborhoods form, how they change, shifts in their significance, and their spatial expressions. Existing research in this emerging field of “gayborhood studies” emphasizes macro-structural explanatory variables, including the economy (e.g., land values, urban governance, growth machine politics, affordability, and gentrification), culture (e.g., public opinions, societal acceptance, and assimilation), and technology (e.g., geo-coded mobile apps, online dating services). In this chapter, I use the residential logics of queer people—why they in their own words say that they live in a gay district—to show how gayborhoods acquire their significance on the streets. By shifting the analytic gaze from abstract concepts to interactions and embodied perceptions on the ground—a “street empirics” as I call it—I challenge the claim that gayborhoods as an urban form are outmoded or obsolete. More generally, my findings caution against adopting an exclusively supra-individual approach in urban studies. The reasons that residents provide for why their neighborhoods appeal to them showcase the analytic power of the streets for understanding what places mean and why they matter.

Horizontal and vertical politics

The spatial expressions of egalitarian and hierarchical political relations, respectively along the horizontal and vertical axis, are visually illustrated in a broad cross-cultural perspective. The dichotomy between los de abajo (those below) and los de arriba (those above) is explored in contemporary Venezuelan politics, using ethnographic and visual evidence. Th e socialist party, which presents itself as representative of los de abajo, has been increasingly criticized for being los de arriba both by the opposition and by grassroots PSUV (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela; United Socialist Party of Venezuela) activists who denounce the persistence of hierarchical dynamics through metaphors such as paracaido (para-shooter) and poner la escalera (holding the ladder).

No effects of modality in development of locative expressions of space in signing and speaking children

Linguistic expressions of locative spatial relations in sign languages are mostly visually motivated representations of space involving mapping of entities and spatial relations between them onto the hands and the signing space. These are also morphologically complex forms. It is debated whether modality-specific aspects of spatial expressions modulate spatial language development differently in signing compared to speaking children. In a picture description task, we compared the use of locative expressions for containment, support, and occlusion relations by deaf children acquiring Turkish Sign Language and hearing children acquiring Turkish (age 3;5–9;11). Unlike previous reports suggesting a boosting effect of iconicity, and/or a hindering effect of morphological complexity of the locative forms in sign languages, our results show similar developmental patterns for signing and speaking children's acquisition of these forms. Our results suggest the primacy of cognitive development guiding the acquisition of locative expressions by speaking and signing children.

Variation in P

Over the past thirty years, the generative framework has greatly contributed to the study of both the internal and external syntax of spatial adpositions, with the intent—among many other things—of giving a unitary account of their heterogeneous nature and behavior. Once the Cinderellas of grammar, prepositions have been extensively investigated in earlier research. The major result of these studies was to show that prepositional phrases have a complex internal structure, and that the grammatical encoding of locative meaning has its own place in UG. This volume constitutes the implementation and the ideal continuation of the seminal proposals in the generative tradition. The essays collected in the first part of the volume not only test these proposals against new (micro-)comparative data, but also shed new light on the relation between spatial expressions and other semantic relations like possession. The second part of the volume looks beyond spatial PPs, exploring the role of Ps not only in non-spatial environments such as comitatives, but also in more general phenomena like verbal affixation, ellipsis, and complementation.

Mutation in Spatial Deixis (Dx)

Two neighboring Algonquian languages, Blackfoot and Plains Cree, differ as to how spatial expressions are represented structurally. Blackfoot it- is an adpositional element occurring within the verbal complex, radically discontinuous from a location-denoting DP; Plains Cree -ihk is an adpositional suffix to a DP, with which it forms a morphological unit. This chapter argues that the contrasting behavior of those morphemes is a function of two factors: (i) which head of the adpositional extended projection each morpheme realizes; (ii) whether or not they have undergone a transcategorial shift—dubbed “mutation”—in the lexicon. This mutation approach applies, for example, to the [PERSON] nature of Blackfoot INFL and to the [TENSE] use of source-denoting Plains Cree adposition ohci and its occurrence within the verbal complex. The emergent category status of adpositions is implicated, too.