The Designation of ‘Dawn’ in the Ibero-Romance Area: a Geolexical and Cognitive Approach

The conception of time and its division into parts of the day has always been a topic of special interest. The interest of the researchers in this topic is not only because it involves a different categorisation of the same reality, but also because it is a semantic field with a high grade of designative variety. The purpose of this study is to examine the designative variation of the concepts ‘dawn’ using the materials offered by Iberian Romance geolinguistics. To develop the research, the authors used atlas data, analysed from the etymological and lexical-semantic standpoint and based on the cognitive semantic framework, in order to firstly determine the differences and similarities in categorising this part of the day in the Iberian Romance linguistic scope and secondly, to analyse the grade of lexical variation of this concept in relation to the semantic motivation giving rise to it.