The concept of manner and its encoding: A view from the periphery

The relationship between the concept of manner and its linguistic encoding, can be approached either from the formal side or from the notional side. Together with the concepts of time and space, the concept manner belongs to the fundamental categories of human cognition (cf. Diessel 1999). It plays an important role in Aristotle’s doctrine of categories, in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and – in a less abstract sense – in the Gricean maxims of conversation. The fundamental nature of the manner concept, and of demonstratives in general, is particularly visible in their role in the genesis of language (gestures) and in their crucial role in the development of grammatical categories (grammaticalization). Our goal is to contribute to the concept-oriented, notional, approach, by starting out from the periphery of its encoding through demonstratives and other expressive devices which abstract from the concrete specification of a manner, thereby providing deeper insights into the general properties of the concept and into the vast number of options of encoding it in languages.