Danish Directional Adverbs (DDA) (for instance op 'up', ned 'down', ud 'out', ind 'in') are very frequently used deictically to profile a specific conceptualisation of and relation to places, persons, institutions within a Motion event (cf. Talmy 2000).

Jeg tager op/ned/ud/ind/om/over/hen/hjem/tilbage til lægen

‘I'm going up/down/out/in/around/over[passing an obstacle]/over[passing no obstacle]/home/back to the doctor'

The choice of DDA can be seen as the mapping of a more or less generalised image schema onto a spatial scene, the chosen DDA reflecting the conceptualization by the speaker of his or her relation to the ground. In this presentation I will show that this kind of situated cognitive mapping is highly conventionalised and embedded in specific social practices.

                      Trying to pin down the different contextual and socio-cultural factors involved in the choice of DDA, I elicited spontaneous use (and non-use) of DDA in semi-structured interviews with dialect-speaking informants from a local community. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods was applied.

                      The data yielded multiple examples of the interplay between basic conceptualisation and socio-cultural practices. The data showed that language users, in their perceptually and conceptually based choice of DDA, are guided by specific conceptualizations of spatial situations, based on prior experience and entrenched in con­ventionalized expressions with DDA.

In this presentation I will focus on two things:

                      1. In the data, spatial construal with DDA can be anchored more systematically to particular communicative and social spheres or deictic centres within the wider language community: individual, local, and supra-local. Especially I will show how local communities can develop and conventionalise specific conceptualisations ("world views"), thus supporting recent findings that (dia)lectal variation is important to cognitive linguistic analysis (cf. Berthele 2004)

                      2. The data also showed that a prerequisite of the conventionalisation of a number of individual and local expressions with DDA is the cognitive entrenchment of a single or repeated specific prior experience, which can be anchored in the social life of individuals as well as groups. Thus, the data supports the claim that cognitive construal is closely connected to specific salient social and psychological experiences and practical knowledge (cf. Bickel 1997). The data invites to further investigation of the relation between basic cognitive patterns, specific communicative and social spheres, and the entrenchment of specific conceptualisations.

Berthele, Raphael 2004: "Wenn viele Wege aus dem Fenster führen". In: Linguistik online 20 (3/2004), 73-91.

Bickel, Balthasar 1997: "Spatial operations in deixis, cognition and culture: where to orient oneself in Belhare". In: Nuyts, Jan & Pederson, Eric (eds.): Language and conceptualization (Language, Culture and Cognition 1), 46-73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Talmy, Leonard 2000: Toward a Cognitive Semantics I-II. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: MIT Press.