Spacetime in language

Abstract

This paper is devoted to inner aspect (i.e. the spatiotemporal information encoded in words) and its relation to spacetime. It constitutes a first attempt to answer basic questions of linguistics by taking advantage of the science and philosophy of spacetime. The paper presents a long-standing problem in linguistics (namely, the definition and the study of event predicates) and illustrates how it can be addressed by bringing to linguistics the idea of events as spacetime points that arises from the 4D understanding of physical world. I propose that the aspectual primitive of event predicates is a spacetime point and I show that this approach constitutes a new and powerful insight for linguistics, while paving the way for a promising connection between cognitive science and the fields of physics and philosophy of spacetime.