Relevant to targeting, space and time in language can be understood as conceptual constructs that share numerous properties — e.g., they are matrices that are straight, evenly distributed, continuous, indefinitely extensive, and stationary, and that contain boundaries, bounded-off portions, and locations. Time uniquely has the properties of progression and grading. The theoretical framework proposed here for the targeting system distinguishes itself from approaches to comparable phenomena found in construction grammar, generative linguistics, computational linguistics, linguistic anthropology, language philosophy, and semiotics. Its seemingly unique features include a trigger’s initiating a hearer’s search for cues to a target, the division of such cues into ten categories, the hearer’s processing in determining this target, and the unity of this processing whether the target is inside or outside speech.
Computational linguistics and generative linguistics