Upside down: an investigation of orientation inversion

Abstract

In this paper, we present a linguistic description of the characteristics and properties of expressions of orientation inversion, used to express the non-canonical positioning of objects. The aim is to describe and analyze the semantic behavior of the expression de cabeça pra baixo (upside down) in spatial and non-spatial contexts using the tools of formal semantics. Based on some notions of vector space semantics (ZWARTS, 1997), we analyzed the expression in question in data collected from the WebCorp (MORLEY, 2006) and Google corpora. The result is an analysis and description of de cabeça pra baixo based on the notions of contextual frame of reference, extrinsic vectors and intrinsic vectors, whose results indicate that de cabeça pra baixo mobilizes only the vertical axis in spatial contexts and therefore combines only with referents that have an orientation in that axis, while in non-spatial uses, because of the impossibility of inverting the axes, de cabeça pra baixo involves not object orientation, but canonical states.