LINGUIST List 5.350

Thu 24 Mar 1994

Disc: Locatives from temporals

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1. benji wald, Re: 5.340 Locatives from temporals
2. , re: 5.340 Locatives from temporals

Message 1: Re: 5.340 Locatives from temporals

Max Wheeler asks about any good examples of shifts TEMP > LOC rather than
 the commonplace reverse shift. Off the top of my head, it seems to me that
 the literate "the former" and "the latter" might be examples (daughters of
 "respectively"). These clearly have temporal meaning in spoken usage, and
 that can be taken as primary -- although etymologically we can trace them
 back to locatives like "first" = former. I'm not sure about the ultimate
origin of "latter" > "last" temp/loc and "late" temp. In any case, the
 point is that the literate uses are spatial derivatives of established
 temporal uses. Finally, let's notice that writing provides a clearly
 motivated context for the conversion of time (speech) to space. Beyond that,
 it is traditional to take LOC meanings as primary, although this seems to
 be a visual prejudice in the innumerable cases of languages in which both
 temp and loc uses of particular "adverbs" (usually originally relational
 nouns) are as old as history. [The prejudice probably emanates from cases
 in which the temp/locs can be traced to body parts, e.g., "ahead" ("behind?"
--just kidding) etc etc. Wheeler's question is longstanding. If we do find
 bona fide examples of TEMP > LOC outside of writing, what could motivate
 them? (Somebody reread Whorf's stuff of Hopi space-time and research
 some more modern spin-offs).

Message 2: re: 5.340 Locatives from temporals

As far as I can tell, French 'depuis' is an example of a preposition
developing a locative sense after being initially purely temporal. The
temporal sense, 'since', still persists of course. Etymological dictionaries
of French appear to agree that 'depuis' was purely temporal in the twelfth
century, but around 1340 began to turn up as an locative (more strictly
ablative) marker, with the sense of spatial 'from'. This is exemplified by a
modern French sentence such as

Depuis ma chambre, je pouvais entendre sa voix
>From my bedroom, I could hear his/her voice

In contrast, the Spanish cognate 'despues (de)' only has a temporal sense.

Considering the many examples of the spatial use of 'depuis' given by
Grevisse in his 'Le Bon Usage', 8th edition, 1964, para. 934bis, I am struck
by the fact that most of them, like the example given above, indicate a point
from which (or in effect at which) a particular perception (seeing or
hearing) takes place. I would be interested to know from experts in and/or
native speakers of French if this is indeed the predominant context for
choosing 'depuis' rather than the more straightforward 'de'.

Lachlan Mackenzie
Free University
Amsterdam