ON PARADOXES OF THE DANISH TEMPORAL PREPOSITIONS AND THEIR PERCEPTIVE EXPLANATION

Abstract

This study, on the one hand, pursues a practical objective, namely to assist Danish language learners in understanding and acquiring some peculiarities of prepositional representations for temporal meanings that can seem odd for native speakers of Russian. On the other hand, it pursues a theoretical objective within the framework of cognitive anthropocentric approach, namely to elicit and to describe the perceptual mechanisms for grammatical categorization in a specific language. By the perceptual mechanisms for temporal categorization we mean the process of human perception of a present situation — its visual recollection in the past and its visual constructs in the future — as being reflected in specific linguistic forms of a certain language culture. The article discusses some specifics of temporal orientation reflected in Danish prepositions denoting time-related meanings. The latter include: the spatial lexeme of frontal orientation for denoting ‘past time’ (fortid); lexeme of lateral orientation siden localizing past events; asymmetrical lexemes (i vs. på, til) localizing past vs. future events, correspondingly; lexemes (efter vs. for) denoting different spatial orientation of similar temporal sequences. The article offers systemic explanation of above paradoxes on the basis of such perception-related meanings as special orientation of a temporal event in relation to the observer; the observer’s internal or external perspective; the observer’s distance from the observed event. The observer’s position is considered thus to be the starting point of subjective orientation in any language and therefore the basis of grammatical categorization.