Dissertationsprojekt Jörg Hartlieb

Topologische Lokalisierung im bibelhebräischen Korpus: Linguistische und Philologische Perspektiven

Fach: Philologie des Christlichen Orients

Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Holger Gzella

While many people are fascinated by galaxies far, far away and getting lost in space, space here on Earth is rather often lost to our attention. Yet spatiality is fundamental to all aspects of human life, including language and cognition: both are deeply structured by spatial „Metaphors We Live by“ (Lakoff / Johnson). Compare, for example, „the day before Monday“ with „the tree before the house“ (TIME), „dying from hunger“ with „coming from Munich“ (CAUSATION), „backyard of the house“ with „background of the story“ (NARRATIVE), „submarine“ with „submission“ (SOCIAL HIERARCHY), etc. So space matters!

However, not all aspects of space matter to my project. (Lexemes denoting) segments of space or spatial properties (e.g. „area“, „tall“) are not included, neither are spatial conditions of word usage (such as FORM in „ring“, or ENVIRONMENT in „street“ (with houses, unlike „road“)), nor cases of indirect usage (metaphors). Instead, the project focuses exclusively on what is found in space: concrete entity-configurations consisting of a) a small figure of interest localized relative to b) a ground-entity.

According to linguistic typology, the basic structure of the system of such spatial relations depends upon two key parameters: a) whether the figure and the ground move relative to one another („I ran through the forest“), and b) whether referencing relies on a coordinate system anchored in the ground, the observer, or an external frame („the bottle in front/to the left/north of the car“).
My project focuses on configurations without movement and without the need for a coordinate system, but with figure and ground being bound in space to one another. Such static and non-angular – that is, topological – relations can differ markedly even among closely related languages. Compare, for example, the unifying use of „on“ in English („cup/stamp/apple/ring on table/envelope/arrow/finger“) with German, which distinguishes between auf (1-3) and an (4), or Dutch, which makes an even threefold distinction between op (1-2), aan (3), and om (4).

Using the Topological Relations Picture Series of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen) as a heuristic tool, I analyze the corpus of the Hebrew Bible across its different genres, synoptic traditions, and diachronic layers in order to reconstruct the Ancient Hebrew semantic space of topological localization. In doing so, I aim both to deepen the philological understanding of these fascinating and influential texts and to contribute a philological perspective to linguistic typology.