Spatial Awareness: Marking and Crossing Boundaries with Prepositions

This chapter discusses spatiality in verbalisations of remembering and particularly the importance of prepositions for depicting mental time travel. The chapter reviews research on image schemas as conceptual distillers of bodily experience, arguing that image schemas such as the container schema help elucidate the embodied basis of lyrical language. This is then demonstrated in the case studies by exploring prepositions as markers of boundaries (and crossing them) in mental time travel. Through an analysis of the use of in, into, within and out (of), the discussion focuses on conceptualising the self as a container for past experiences.