Keywords: phenomenology, linguistic experience, reading experience, fiction, spatiality
The paper takes a phenomenological approach and looks into spatial formations (such as a room, a territory, a landscape, a city, a country) that are indicated in conversation and texts of literary fiction. As an example of such spatial formations we can think of the “Middle-earth” in The Lord of the Rings, but also of almost any spatially situated object or action that is conveyed to us by using words. Most of the research into the readers’ experience of fiction holds the view that these spaces are imaginary, i.e. they are a product…

Keywords: corpus linguistics, semi-spontaneous speech, external cases, Estonian language
We proceed from the tenets of usage-based linguistics which stresses the importance of studying language use, especially quantitative frequency measures, in order to make (qualitative) inferences about linguistic knowledge. We focus on the frequency counts of Estonian external cases (allative, adessive, ablative) and their different functions in semi-spontaneous everyday speech. The automatic transcription system applied for the present study can be accessed free of charge via the web application http://bark.phon.ioc.ee/webtrans. In our study we used the recordings of 2,681 radio broadcasts containing 15,318,158 transcribed words in total. The average word error rate…

Keywords: semantics, adpositions, spatial language, frames of reference, front-back
Languages differ in how they encode spatial frames of reference. The article examines Estonian postpositions which denote front and back relations: ette ‘in front of [illative]’, ees ‘in front of [inessive]’, taha ‘to the back’, taga ‘back, behind’, tagant ‘from behind’.
The goal of the study was to discover systematic patterns in how the reference frames are used to locate spatial entities (ground objects) in the front-back dimension in Estonian. The study is corpus-based, the data coming from the Estonian National Corpus 2017 (1,107,584,469 words), collected via Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al.…

Keywords: learning space, metaphors in learning, critical discourse analysis, construing of experiences, construing of perceptions
The aim of the article is to understand and describe the hidden meanings of learning space in the construing of learning space experience among learners in university. We also attempt to identify how to change the learning space so that it would support learning and teaching and promote the emergence of learning communities. Universities around the globe have been investing in the creation of contemporary learning spaces (Cox 2011) but the sole focus on new spatial solutions disguises the inability to be engaged in the content-related…

Keywords: concept of learning, educational terminology, dictionary, field of meaning, discourse analysis
In our article we conceptualise the meaning of the Estonian words õpiruum ‘learning space’ and õpperuum ‘study space’ by analysing media texts retrieved from the Internet. A media text, as we understand it, is any constructed media product or piece of communication, whether printed or audiovisual, which can be analysed and deconstructed. Until recently, the two terms õpiruum and õpperuum have been used inconsistently and all too often as synonyms in Estonian. By presenting several examples and pictures from media texts we argue that these two terms should rather…

Keywords: traffic, pedestrian, walking, mobility, flaneur
Embarking from the “mobilities turn” in social sciences and humanities, this article attends to the movement in urban space from the perspective of language. This is done by an analysis of one specific word in Estonian – liiklema directly translated as ‘to participate in traffic’ – its introduction and change of use. Liiklema is an invented term from the 1920s, brought to Estonian by recognised linguist Johannes Voldemar Veski, with an aim to find a word that would capture the meanings conveyed by communication in English or the German Verkehr. However, once the word liiklema…

Keywords: public space, place, architecture, urbanism, geography
Over the last five years, the Estonian society has begun to pay more attention to the environment we live, work and relax in. The use of the concept of ‘space’ and its association with the word ‘public’ is a practical problem on the way to a common understanding of space and its use. The ambiguity of the concept of space must be taken into account, both in everyday language and in scientific language. The concept of ‘public space’ is a rapidly developing concept in various fields in the Estonian language, yet in today’s legislation…

Keywords: semantics, vocabulary, folk taxonomy, list task, cognitive salience index, semi-structured interview
When we study the organisation of space, one possibility is to talk about landscape as every human being is surrounded by landscape at all times (Burenhult and Levinson 2008). This is the first attempt to describe the language of landscape in Estonian. We used list task questions and semi-structured interviews as combined methods. 124 participants took part in the first part of the study (74 school-children, 7 students and 42 teachers or university professors, 80 female) where nine questions were asked under time pressure (30 seconds). All were adapted…

Keywords: funeral poem, family history, Greek, Pietism, Rostock University, Schwaan
Based on biographical data in two funeral sermons printed in 1625 and 1627, the ­article introduces the family of the poet and future professor of Greek at the Gymnasium in Tallinn, Reiner Brockmann (1609–1647), and, more specifically, the social circle of his parents, notably his father, the Reverend Reiner Brockmann (1568–1626). It appears that those who expressed their condolences in the form of funeral poems in Latin dedicated to the deceased spose of Reverend Brockmann, Margareta Scheff­ter (1570–1625), were not only associated with the Faculty of Religion of ­Rostock University, but…

Keywords: working-class literature, literary history, working-class movement
The article is motivated by the marginal position of working-class literature in modern academic literary studies and the available theoretical views and definitions of working-class literature, which are largely obsolete or just superficial. The article highlights the problems associated with defining the concept of working-class literature, based on the relevant theories of well-recognised researchers such as John Lennon, Magnus Nilsson, Raoul Palmgren, Elsi Hyttinen and others. The focus is on the main definitions of working-class literature so far and their critique. The article seeks to provide answers to questions concerning the definition of working-class…

Keywords: pragmatism, semantic pragmatism, representationalism, Ene Mihkelson, scepticism, history
The article argues that the aesthetics of Ene Mihkelson’s prose invites the reader to give up the representationalist framework and instead adopt semantic pragmatism. Representationalism is a position in philosophy of language according to which sentences represent mind- and language-independent objective reality. Semantic pragmatism, however, does not consider sentences as representing reality, but rather takes the central aspect of a sentence’s meaning to be its role in a community’s language game.
The first part of the article explains how semantic pragmatism rejects representationalism, acknowledges the discursive-conceptual trap and thereby mitigates scepticism. According to…

Keywords: national identity, national narratives/myths, forest nation, Estonia
Contemporary Estonian identity includes a motif of Estonians as a nature-loving forest people. Although not original – its equivalents can be found across Europe – the motif describes Estonians as having a unique relationship with the local forest, reaching back to the ancient times. The article tracks down the formation of this motif and identifies the most important factors of intellectual and social history that have contributed to its development. An insight is given into the structure and subgenres of national narratives, how do they relate and support each other, and how they change.
As…

Keywords: cognitive linguistics, semantics, introspection, experimental methods, multidimensional scaling, facet theory
The aim of the article is to introduce a combination of research methods for studying polysemy. Ranking task is the central tool of this methodological combination, which enables creation of a semantic description that reflects how language users distinguish meanings of the studied word. For introducing the research process I used the Estonian adjective vana ‘old’ as an example. At the beginning of the study, I made the assumption that different senses of the adjective vana are related to different interpretations of time. Introspective analysis of the semantics of the adjective vana included four pairs of opposite…