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تسجيل

The dynamic nature of meaning construction

المؤلف:  Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green

المصدر:  Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction

الجزء والصفحة:  C11-P386

2026-01-22

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The dynamic nature of meaning construction

In this section we focus on the dynamic aspect of meaning construction. This relates to the way in which interlocutors (discourse participants) keep track of the spaces that have been set up during ongoing discourse, including the content of the various spaces, the links between them and their sequence. Language assists in this process in two main ways: (1) the grammatical tense aspect system signals time reference (the location in time of one space relative to another); and (2) the grammatical system of epistemic modality signals epistemic distance. Epistemic modality is a type of grammatical marking that reflects the speaker’s knowledge or opinion concerning the likelihood, possibility or certainty of the proposition expressed by a sentence. Epistemic modality therefore concerns the reality status of one space with respect to another. Because tense, aspect and modality are often closely inter woven within the grammatical systems of languages, this area is often abbreviated to the ‘TAM’ system. We explore the Mental Spaces Theory approach to these two aspects of the TAM system in the following sections.