Pour une typologie des emplois de là-bas

Summary

Space appears to be a primary cognitive notion in grammar, especially when it comes to dealing with problems about the representation of meaning. Indeed, it enables to « embody » a large part of our cognition and structure our conceptual approach. It is possible to find many recent cognitive studies about spatial prepositions (dans, sur, sous…), but it is not the case with ici/là/là-bas, although these have a particular place in spatial reference.

This article aims at to compense for this lack and give back to là-bas its true place in the system of spatial deixis. We defend the hypothesis that là-bas is an opaque indexical symbol, “a phrase that points to its referent through elements that are spatio-temporally linked to its occurrence” (Kleiber, 1986). This hypothesis enables us to grab the different uses of là-bas from a single point of view and establish the fact that there is only one adverb despite the various intermediary elements. And consequently these elements are the base of our typologie. In conclusion the way là-bas is used is proved to be more complex than hinted at in former approaches.