Bridging Gaps; Building Bridges: Figures of Speech, Symbolic Expression, and Pedagogy

The coexistence of language and space involves more than matters of approximation and equivalence. Beyond simple binaries expressed perhaps most vividly in Saussurean terms, beyond, in fact, any simple invocation of structure, language in a quite fundamental sense is space: without the spatiality embedded within and practiced across the Saussurean bar between signifier and signified, the very notion of “approximation” would be unthinkable.¹ But between such poststructural meditations and assumed structural properties, language has arguably always displayed an uncanny flexibility to act spatially by adopting meaning to suit acknowledged indirect needs. The terms for such openly “shifty” or “spatial” companions are part of the linguistic repertoire and as such part of rhetoric: from metonymy to allegory, from synecdoche to metaphor, words can and often do derive their power from the fact that they embody spatial characteristics of sorts. But in-and-of-itself, the spatial structure of language only ever extends so far; for it to acquire meaning and power, it needs to be practiced, recognized, and enacted in concrete settings by people familiar with the multiple possible dances around Saussure’s dividing line.