The cognitive and functional approach to verbalization of movement in communicative space

Abstract

The paper addresses the problem of conceptualization of communicative space in English. Space is a fundamental notion of human thinking that represents a diversified nature of the world’s existence in its inhomogeneity; it is an environment of communicative activity and a necessary element of perceiving the world. Producing statements, communicants create communicative space. It consists of personal spaces of discursive personalities, which are the addresser’s and addressee’s ones that have a center and periphery with moveable boundaries. In a natural language, a mental representation of space is transformed into text. Studying the ways, in which motion in space is verbalized, remains one of the topical issues of the present-day linguistic research. Yet, motion in the personal or communicative space is still in need of an in-depth analysis. The research focuses on the image schematic structure of motion, which is actualized by verbal constructions of motion in space. Considering fragments that include expressions describing motion in the communicative space, we have revealed that the verbal constructions of motion in space actualize the source / path / goal schema with its binary oppositions (forward and back) and constituents, the part / whole schema by describing the whole-body or the part-body movement of the communicant, and the center / periphery schema that conceptualizes motion in space depending upon how far the communicant moves.