On the very idea of a frame of reference1

2002

This paper is concerned with spatial Frames of Reference as they are expressed in language. Frames of Reference (FoR) may be regarded as spatial coordinate systems. In effect they are strategies for locating a referent (or figure) in relation to a relatum (or ground), on the basis of a search domain projected off the relatum. In the car is in front of/north of the church the car is located in relation to the church, with in front of and north of representing alternative strategies for projecting a search domain off the church. In front of and north of therefore operate in different FoR. Until the 1990s linguistic spatial reference was generally held to be fundamentally egocentric and anthropomorphic. Referents were understood to be located in relation to relata on the basis of a deictic viewpoint or on the basis of a human-like asymmetry assigned to the relatum and treated as intrinsic to it. The fundamental distinction was thus held to be between deictic and intrinsic. Research ove...

2007

Argument 2.1 Allocentric Frames of Reference and Alter-Ego Vantage Points 3. The Self-Location Argument 4. Conclusion III. SELLARSIAN PERSPECTIVES ON PERCEPTION AND NON-CONCEPTUAL CONTENT 1. Functional Roles and Rules of Application 2. Relating Thoughts to Objects 3. Intuitions and Demonstratives 4. Conclusion v IV. PERCEPTUAL CONTENT, REPRESENTATIONS, AND RELATIONS 1. Relations and Representations 2. Relational Contents 3. Criticism of Object-Dependent Perceptual Content 4. Perceptual Content without Epistemic Intermediaries 5. Conclusion BIBLIOGRAPHY vi I have older debts. I am strongly influenced by Friedrich Kambartel, my advisor in Frankfurt. He showed me what it means to think carefully, what it means to think about topics that matter, and always to distinguish between terminological and philosophical disputes. I was lucky to have had the chance to be taught by him at an early stage and I hope that I learnt from him. My warmest thanks also to Beni Adler, Brigitta Bernet, Renata Burckhardt, and Harry Witzthum for igniting my interest in philosophy more than a decade ago and for their loyal friendship ever since. For better or worse, I wouldn't be who I am without them. My greatest debt is to my parents. I have been inspired by my mother's creativity and integrity and my father's idealism and dedication. I thank them for everything. *** I am grateful to the Norwegian Research Council for their generous funding.

2007

Language Sciences, 2011

Mopan (Mayan) speakers, who rely heavily on intrinsic frames of reference in spatial language, also classify two-dimensional forms intrinsically on a non-linguistic task (Danziger, 1999). This is compatible with the predictions of the Whorf hypothesis, but could also be an artifact of using 2D materials in a population with low literacy levels. This paper reports that Mopan speakers categorize even 3D objects as predicted by intrinsic encoding, thus increasing support for the Whorfian interpretation of their performance. A group of US English speakers shows the opposite tendency, confirming that task performance is under cultural, and therefore perhaps linguistic, influence.

This work focuses on the concept of frame of reference. Levinson (2003) suggested that spatial information encoded in one frame of reference cannot be translated into another one. While this is partially true in language, I argue for a nesting relationship between frames of reference at the conceptual level. A set of spatial concepts suggested by Lehman & Bennardo (2003) informs this investigation. In closing a new typology of frames of reference is proposed.

Language Sciences, 2010

Rob MacLaury's Vantage Theory, VT, models the way in which a cognizer constructs, recalls, uses, and modifies a category in terms of point of view or vantage. Alongside of VT, there is place for the kind of semantic specification found in the lexicon. VT2 (Allan 2002, "Vantage theory, VT2, and number", Language Sciences 24 (5-6), pp. 679-703) was proposed to preserve a quasi-traditional, comparatively formal semantics while accommodating the importance of viewpoint to meaning. In MacLaury's VT an object or event is categorized relative to the perspective of a cognizer such that VT is a theory of points of view which give rise to categories. VT2 captures the conceptualizations that lie behind the various elements in the cognizer's categorization such that it is a theory of points of view embodied in conceptualizations. In this paper I adopt Adam Głaz's useful concept, Extended Vantage Theory (EVT), to encompass both VT and VT2.

2007

Is there a first-person, experiential spatial frame of reference that is absolute? Merleau-Ponty, like Kant, recognized that there is something special about our own bodies, and that they play a specific role in the institution of spatial frames of reference. In spatial terms we treat our body differently from any other object. In this chapter I explicate the way the body helps to generate spatial frames of reference, which in turn, however, do not cross the frontier of the body itself. In addition I show that within the envelope of the body itself we find a spatial frame of reference that is absolute.

Memory & Cognition, 2006

Spatial perspective can be directed by various reference frames, as well as by the direction of motion. In the present study, we explored how ambiguity in spatial tasks can be resolved. Participants were presented with virtual reality environments in order to stimulate a spatial reference frame based on motion. They interacted with an ego-moving spatial system in Experiment 1 and an object-moving spatial system in Experiment 2. While interacting with the virtual environment, the participants were presented with either a question representing a motion system different from that of the virtual environment or a nonspatial question relating to physical features of the virtual environment. They then performed the target task: assign the label front in an ambiguous spatial task. The findings indicate that the disambiguation of spatial terms can be influenced by embodied experiences, as represented by the virtual environment, as well as by linguistic context.

dirkkindermann.com

e received picture of linguistic communication understands communication as the transmission of information from speaker's head to hearer's head. is picture is in conflict with the attractive Lewisian view of belief as self-location, which is motivated by de se attitudes -attitudes about oneself -as well as attitudes about subjective matters such as personal taste. In this paper, I provide a solution to the conflict that reconciles these views. I argue for an account of mental attitudes and communication on which mental content and speech act content is understood as sets of sequenced worlds -roughly, possible worlds 'centered' on a sequence of individuals at a time. I develop a Stalnakerian model of communication based on sequenced worlds content, and I provide a suitable semantics for personal pronouns and predicates of personal taste.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2018

To what extent is the choice of what to say driven by seemingly irrelevant cues in the visual world being described? Among such cues, how does prior description affect how we process spatial scenes? When people describe where objects are located their use of spatial language is often associated with a choice of reference frame. Two experiments employing between-participants designs (N = 490) examined the effects of visual cueing and previous description on reference frame choice as reflected in spatial prepositions (in front of, to the left of, etc.) to describe pictures of object pairs. Experiment 1 examined the effects of visual and linguistic cues on spatial description choice through movement of object(s) in spatial scenes, showing sizeable effects of visual cueing on reference frame choice. Experiment 2 monitored eye movements of participants following a linguistic example description, revealing two findings: eye movement "signatures" associated with distinct reference frames as expressed in language, and transfer of these eye movement patterns just prior to spatial description for different (later) picture descriptions. Both verbal description and visual cueing similarly influence language production choice through manipulation of visual attention, suggesting a unified theory of constraints affecting spatial language choice.

2010

are context-sensitive. That, at least, is what a contextualist would say. But, a literalist might argue, this is an illusion. According to the literalist, what Josh (literally) asked in (1) is whether there are any philosophers tout court, and Marsha's answer in (2) is made true by the mere existence of some philosopher somewhere, regardless of how things stand at the symposium. And while her answer to Josh's question is almost trivially true, what she further says is almost trivially false, since, according to the literalist, it means that most people in the universe are linguists. In other words, literalism holds that quantifier words such as "there are", "most", "every", etc. always behave the way we would take them to behave in e.g. "There are no unicorns" or "Most people have an IQ over 80;" that is, that they quantify over everything, in a contextindependent manner. Context-sensitivity, in such a case, is merely apparent. The only cases in which context can have an impact on semantic content and truth value are those of resolving lexical and syntactic ambiguities and of determining the reference of indexicals such as "I", "this", or "today". In a situation in which 90% of the people at the symposium are linguists, the literalist claims that what Marsha says in (2) is false, while the contextualist claims that it is true. There is no doubt that ordinary speakers' intuitions on truth value are more in line with the contextualist predictions than with the literalist. The literalist's assignment of truth-conditions to sentences like (1) and (2) are strikingly counter-intuitive. Literalism thus faces the problem of accounting for ordinary speakers' intuitions, and its proponents typically argue that what speakers' intuitions actually track is some level of pragmatically conveyed content, rather than semantic content itself. In other words, literalists hold that speakers often mistake what is conveyed for what is said. It should be noted that none of the contributions in this book attempts to argue for semantic minimalism. This, in our view, reflects the fact that the recent attempts to resurrect literalism have failed. 3 3. The semantics/pragmatics interface The next debate of importance is internal to the contextualist camp, and it is well-represented in this book. Consider, again, the case of quantifier domain restriction, illustrated by the dialogue above. There remains Introduction 15 References

Frames of knowledge and perception, 2020

Journal of Pragmatics, 2010

This research tested the linguistic relativity theory in relation to the conceptual domain of manner of motion. Nineteen English and 19 Italian native speakers completed two tasks involving the use of 26 triads of video-clips showing motion events. The participants underwent first a non-linguistic trial consisting of a forced-choice similarity judgement task performed during speech shadowing. Subsequently, they were asked to verbally describe the same stimulus material used for their similarity judgements. Congruently with the findings of Cardini (2008), an analysis of the verbal descriptions showed that English speakers provided much more information about the manner in which some motion occurs than Italian speakers. However, in contrast to the significant difference found across the two linguistic groups in the verbal task, the scores regarding the non-linguistic performances were close to identical: when visually attending to the motion events displayed in the video-clips, English and Italian speakers exhibited the same differential attention for manner vs. path of motion. The results of this study provide evidence against Whorfian effects on non-linguistic cognition.

Most linguistic and cognitive representations of space depend on frames of reference (FoRs). We show that FoRs play an equally important role in representations of the orientation of entities and representations of their location and direction of motion. We propose that orientation is conceptually encoded, not in terms of metaphorical path functions (Jackendof 1983), but in terms of vectors. Equipped with the notion of vectors, we introduce a distinction between two classes of FoRs: classical “angular-anchored” FoRs and the previously unrecognised “head-anchored” FoRs. In English, angular-anchored relative FoRs dominate in both locative and orientation descriptions. In contrast, in Seri and Yucatec, two indigenous languages of Mexico, object-centred angularanchored FoRs dominate in locative descriptions, but head-anchored FoRs dominate in orientation descriptions.

Spatial Cognition & …, 2003