Spatial parts

A prototype thing, such as a rock, can be said to have a top, a bottom (or base), sides and a front and back. Two points need to be noted about these words. One is that they are general: very many different kinds of thing – windows, heads, faces, feet, buses, trees, canyons, to randomly name just a few – have tops, bottoms, sides, fronts and backs. In Section 3.2 this will be explained in terms of a thing having spatial parts, making the possession of such parts characteristic of prototypes in the thing-category. The other notable feature of spatial part words is that they are often deictic.

Pragmatics enters the interpretation of deictic words. As explained, the meaning of a deictic word is tied to the situation of utterance. The front of a rock faces the speaker and the back of a rock faces away from the speaker, and the sides are to the left and right from the point of view of the speaker. What counts as the top of the rock and what counts as the bottom or base of the rock depends on which way up the rock happens to be lying at the time of utterance. However, many things – bus is a good example – inherently have a non-deictic top, bottom, front and back, and sides. The top of a bus is its roof, even in the dire case of one lying overturned at the side of the road; the front of a bus is the driver’s end of it, regardless of where the speaker is viewing it from; and so on. It is with things that do not inherently have these parts that the deictic top, bottom, front, back and sides come into play. Notice that a rescue worker who is standing “on top” (as one might say deictically) of an overturned bus is not on the top (part) of the bus. The list in Table 3.1 gives further examples.

There are additional subtleties that would have to be dealt with in a fuller account. For instance, it is possible to cede deictic centrality to someone being addressed, as when – speaking from behind a tree – a person says: “Just open your eyes and you’ll see the notice: (from where you are) it’s pinned on the front of the tree.”