Contrast sets in spatial and temporal language

How do speakers choose suitable words for a description, and how do recipients identify the intended interpretation out of the wide range of (partly overlapping) meanings as defined in a dictionary or encyclopedia? Spatial and temporal terms such as left, front, before, after, long, wide, in, and out are particularly intriguing as they involve not only an intricate relationship to the spatiotemporal context and its mental conceptualization, but also a vast potential for extended (e.g., metaphorical) meanings. Furthermore, they are typically associated with relative and qualitative, rather than absolute or quantitative metric concepts, allowing for a great variety of interpretations. A lexical item like long, for example, may be conceived of as the opposite of short; but the absolute size of the entity referred to remains unspecified. Furthermore, long may also be interpreted as contrasting with wide or broad, or it may specify linearity rather than extendedness, and it could be similar in meaning to big or tall. Additionally, it may refer to spatial as well as temporal or further extended domains, as in a long text. As this example indicates, a central aspect of interpreting the meaning of utterances lies in identifying those aspects that the utterance contrasts with, ruling out conceivable alternatives. As Nemo (1999, p. 353) points out: ‘‘what is said (or asked) is relevant insofar as it makes a difference’’, namely, a difference to the set of alternatives that the utterance distinguishes. This aspect of linguistic communication has been widely discussed and investigated from a number of perspectives as part of various theoretical approaches to the semantics/pragmatics interface, for example, Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986), Functional Grammar (Halliday 1985), and Alternative Semantics which extends the idea to claims of truth-conditional effects, cf. Rooth (1992). In this theory-neutral contribution, we apply the general idea to the interpretation of spatial and temporal language in order to specify how differences in the contextual contrast sets inform the interpretation of a particular subclass of linguistic items, namely, spatial and temporal terms.