Chapter 1. Introduction: The description of motion events

Studies in Language, 2009

2012

This literature review analyzes articles on the perception of space, motion and time across speakers of typologically different languages (L1s). The purpose of this analysis is to explore evidence of native language influence on speakers' perception and conceptualization of these cognitive domains. The analysis revealed that although languages may not encode all the cognitive aspects of space and motion, there is no difference among speakers with regard to the conceptualization and perception of these two domains. On the other hand, language-specific encodings of time seem to influence the speakers' perception of this domain, so it was concluded that language may affect abstract thought in general. Possible consequences for second language acquisition are discussed. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born-the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

2007

Spatial Cognition & Computation, 2011

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Cognition, 2002

Spanish predict how speakers of these languages perform in non-linguistic tasks. Using 36 motion events, we compared English and Spanish speakers' linguistic descriptions to their performance on two non-linguistic tasks: recognition memory and similarity judgments. We investigated the effect of language processing on non-linguistic performance by varying the nature of the encoding before testing for recognition and similarity. Participants encoded the events while describing them verbally or not. No effect of language was obtained in the recognition memory task after either linguistic or non-linguistic encoding and in the similarity task after non-linguistic encoding. We did find a linguistic effect in the similarity task after verbal encoding, an effect that conformed to languagespecific patterns. Linguistic descriptions directed attention to certain aspects of the events later used to make a non-linguistic judgment. This suggests that linguistic and non-linguistic performance are dissociable, but language-specific regularities made available in the experimental context may mediate the speaker's performance in specific tasks. q 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Inc.

Can I, in fact, say that I am this language I speak, into which my thought insinuates itself to the point of finding in it the system of all its own possibilities, yet which exists only in the weight of sedimentations my thought will never be capable of actualizing altogether?

Anuario del seminario de Filología Vasca 'Julio de …

The Motion event and space are two central phenomena in cognitive linguistics because they are primary in human experience and cognition. However, it is a well-established fact that languages differ in their linguistic expression of Motion.. The Motion event is subject to human spatial thinking and to crosslinguistic variations. In addition, the construction of a basic Motion event has a mental schema in the human mind, i.e. it provides a cognitive framework to the meaning of abstract domains, and it is lexicalised in all the world's languages. Space is a complex linguistic domain based on the interaction between language and cognition. In the traditional approaches to linguistics, space is treated as the physical location of an entity; however, in cognitive linguistics, space is considered as a mental representation ; that is, in addition to being physical, space 1 This paper is based on an MA thesis written by the second researcher and supervised by the first.

Typological Studies in Language, 2006

Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science, 2010

There exist several proposals regarding the relation between Cognition and Language with respect to 'Space', our understanding of objects and their changing position in the world. Some earlier approaches assume that Language conveys a radically impoverished amount of information than that processed at a visual level (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993). More recent approaches instead argue that 'spatial language' is closer in richness to 'spatial cognition', but do so by positing a blurrier boundary between the two levels of comprehension (Coventry & Garrod, 2004). In this paper I will offer an argument for a novel synthesis of these two positions, based on what counts as 'spatial cognition' and 'spatial language', and what core properties can be found across these two levels of information-processing. I will also propose that there is also a crucial difference between these two levels: that of fine-grainedness, namely the amount of information we wish to convey and to omit when we produce a sentence regarding objects and their position.