Language, Cognition, and Logic Viewed from the Polysemy of the Japanese Formal Noun tokoro (location)

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate an approach to language as it relates to cognition and thought processes by looking into the mapping relation among spatial, temporal, and modal domains. I will take up the problem of polysemy involving tokoro, a formal noun meaning ‘location’ in Japanese, to discuss such questions as the relation between language and inferential mechanisms, the interface between syntax and semantics, and the relation between semantics and pragmatics. I will first discuss various spatial usages of tokoro expressing place or location to characterize its core meaning as ‘identifying a reference point’, which is crucially used in relative nouns expressing spatial orientation. Second, I will examine how the core meaning thus characterized can be extended to the temporal domain. In the temporal domain, tokoro identifies a part of the temporal trace of an event as a reference point and locates the event with respect to the reference point identified by tokoro, thereby accounting for how the addition of tokoro to a predicate restricts the interpretive possibilities for terms expressing tense and aspect, specifically -ru, -te iru and -ta. In the modal domain, tokoro, when attached to a predicate, requires the sentence to be a counterfactual conditional: both the antecedent and the consequent must be interpreted to be counterfactual. I demonstrate how the characterization of tokoro as ‘identifying a reference point’, and the mechanisms underlying said characterization as argued for in this paper can account for the counterfactuality of tokoro conditionals in the modal domain.