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Formalizing a Unique Space-Time Grammatical Mapping in a North American Indigenous Language Family (Short Paper)

Author Zahur Ashrafuzzaman

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Author Details

Zahur Ashrafuzzaman
  • Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, Canada
  • Department of Linguistics, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to James Crippen (Department of Linguistics, McGill University) for supervising earlier versions of this work and providing several key insights.

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Zahur Ashrafuzzaman. Formalizing a Unique Space-Time Grammatical Mapping in a North American Indigenous Language Family (Short Paper). In 16th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 315, pp. 27:1-27:10, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2024.27

Abstract

The Na-Dene language family uses a system of verbal prefixes to indicate spatial orientation. This same system is generalized to express aspectual (temporal) meaning. I formalize the semantics of these prefixes as they relate to both time and space, arguing that this line of inquiry is a useful basis for interdiscplinary cognitive science focusing on the intersection of spatial and linguistic cognition.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Applied computing
Keywords
  • linguistics
  • syntax
  • semantics
  • cognitive science
  • spatial cognition
  • Indigenous language
  • time
  • temporal
  • mapping

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