• Maria Telegina Postdoctoral Fellow, Tokyo College, The University of Tokyo

My research is focused on the perception and expression of time and space concepts in contemporary Japanese. Through the frameworks of cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics, it examines material obtained through a set of experiments with Japanese native speaking participants – a free word association experiment and spontaneous speech experiments on temporal and on spatial description strategies.
Network analysis of the materials obtained through the free word association experiment revealed that time and space concepts are most closely related to the concepts of emotional evaluation, family/human relations, and work.

Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the corpora based on the material of the spontaneous speech experiments allowed me to formulate typologies of temporal and spatial description strategies in Japanese.

The findings of my study demonstrate that some of the strategies of extended spatial and temporal description seen in Japanese native speakers have not been described in research conducted on more extensively investigated languages. In this presentation, I am going to further elaborate on typologies of description and features of temporal and spatial domains of the Japanese mental lexicon.