Hans Goebl
We know that language changes over time and that these changes occur practically law-like. It's also well known that language changes similarly in (geographic) space. As the dimensions of time and space are closely related, we can assume that spatial changes of language are quite far from being chaotic or hazard-driven.
Obviously speaking about space without referring to maps is impossible. In whatsoever discipline. But maps are only heuristic instruments of visualization and representation which desserve (or should do it) previously established empirical or theoretical concepts.
Grammar, in my mind, is a highly organic complex of different linguistic levels and categories whose relations to space can be studied only by the analysis of a great number of cartographically fixed linguistic features. This analysis can be done again in a particular and/or global way.
However the methodical interwovennes of phenomenological categories as time and space and scientific concepts (viz. tools) as grammar and maps was and is highly complex.
In my talk I'll examine some problems and aspects of the interaction of these four domains, mainly from the viewpoint of Romance (geo)linguistics.