“I woke up from the sofa”

Tuomas Huumo’s paper is a study on fictive motion as manifested by the uses of the Finnish directional (‘to’ vs. ‘from’) local cases in expressions that involve a cognitive change. The cognitive change takes place in the relationship between an experiencer and a stimulus, in such a way that the stimulus either enters or exits the cognitive dominion of the experiencer (i.e., its consciousness, awareness, or field of perception). Verbs that indicate such relations include verbs of perception (e.g., ‘see’, ‘hear’ ‘smell’) and verbs of more abstract cognitive contact (e.g., ‘find’, ‘lose’, ‘forget’). The general observation is that even though such situations do not involve actual spatial motion, Finnish uses the directional local cases to indicate the static spatial position of the stimulus that changes its relationship with the cognitive dominion. It is argued that such uses of the directional cases show that the conceptualization of such cognitive changes reflected by the structure of Finnish involves fictive motion between different dominions and a deep and direct interaction between cognitive dominions and space.