Holistic spatial semantics of Thai

A (generic) spatial utterance is an utterance which helps the listener determine the location of a given entity – if the described situation is static – or else the trajectory of its motion. Hence, it can be seen as an explicit or implicit answer to a where-question. The following are thus examples of prototypical English spatial utterances: The toothpaste is on the shelf. He is going to school. She comes from the South. The train will pass through the tunnel. An approach to spatial semantics that has the utterance (itself embedded in discourse and a background of practices) as its main unit of analysis, rather than the isolated word, may be characterized as dialogical (cf. Wold 1992) and more importantly for the present context – holistic. Such an approach aims to determine the semantic contribution of each and every element of the spatial utterance in relation to the meaning of the whole utterance – a desideratum for semantics that can be traced back to Frege’s (1953 [1884]) “context principle”. One major advantage of such an approach to more traditional (cognitive) spatial semantic theories is that by taking its point of departure from the whole, rather than from the parts, it does not limit the analysis to a particular linguistic form (e.g over, cf. Lakoff 1987), form class (e.g. prepositions, cf. Cuyckens 1991), or theoretically biased grammatical notion (e.g. “closed-class elements” cf. Talmy 1988). The conceptual framework of situated embodiment (Zlatev 1997) implies such a dialogical, holistic approach to spatial meaning, resulting in the theory of holistic spatial semantics (HSS), which has been applied to a diverse set of languages. In this paper, after a summary of the theoretical framework in Section 2, I will use this theory to analyze the structure and semantics of spatial utterances in Thai. I will try to show that HSS allows a perspicacious analysis of the complicated semantic and syntactic interdependencies between the members of a number of distinct form classes, exemplified in (1).