Space in Language and Cognition

This paper, which is a synthesis of several previous publications, analyzes some of the principles according to which it is possible to build an analogy, or even a continuity, between language and perception. Several misleading options are identified, arising from erroneous models of perception, and the non-taking into account of polysemy as a fundamental property of language. The key question of the relation between spatial and less- or non spatial uses of words will lead us to come back to the Gestalt and phenomenological theories of perception and action, which more than ever offer irreplaceable insights for semantics. We then sketch a radically dynamical theoretical framework, which gives a fundamental role to the mathematical concepts of instability. On this basis, the microgenesis of what we call Semantic Forms can be distributed between three layers of meaning, or ‘stabilization and development phases’, named motifs, profiles, and themes.

Language, 2003

Most approaches to spatial language have assumed that the simplest spatial notions are (after Piaget) topological and universal (containment, contiguity, proximity, support, represented as semantic primitives such as IN, ON, UNDER, etc.). These concepts would be coded directly in language, above all in small closed classes such as adpositions--thus providing a striking example of semantic categories as language-specific projections of universal conceptual notions. This idea, if correct, should have as a consequence that the semantic categories instantiated in spatial adpositions should be essentially uniform crosslinguistically. This article attempts to verify this possibility by comparing the semantics of spatial adpositions in nine unrelated languages, with the help of a standard elicitation procedure, thus producing a preliminary semantic typology of spatial adpositional systems. The differences between the languages turn out to be so significant as to be incompatible with stronger versions of the UNIVERSAL CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES hypothesis. Rather, the language-specific spatial adposition meanings seem to emerge as compact subsets of an underlying semantic space, with certain areas being statistical ATTRACTORS or FOCI. Moreover, a comparison of systems with different degrees of complexity suggests the possibility of positing implicational hierarchies for spatial adpositions. But such hierarchies need to be treated as successive divisions of semantic space, as in recent treatments of basic color terms. This type of analysis appears to be a promising approach for future work in semantic typology.* A DISTILLATION OF HUMAN SPATIAL COGNITION. In studies of spatial language, a standard line or set of orthodox assumptions has arisen, along the following lines: 1. The simplest spatial notions are topological-concepts of proximity, contiguity, containment (Piaget & Inhelder 1956). 2. Such notions can be taken to be either primitive, so that we have conceptual primes like IN, ON, UNDER (Jackendoff 1983), or near-primitive, so that, for example, IN is decomposed in terms of at least partial INCLUSION (Miller & Johnson-Laird 1976). 3. These concepts are more or less directly coded in spatial language, above all in the closed-class spatial relators like prepositions and postpositions, which have (comparatively) simple semantics (Talmy 1983), largely universal in nature since they correspond to elements of our neurocognition (Landau & Jackendoff 1993). Consequently, 'we can develop a fairly comprehensive idea of the spatial relations expressed in language by focusing on spatial prepositions' (Landau & Jackendoff 1993:223). 4. Hence, the topological adpositions are among the earliest linguistic concepts learned by children (Johnston & Slobin 1979), and in learning them children map * Colleagues in the Language and Cognition Group who provided crucial data are: Jtirgen Bohnemeyer,

Language, 1998

This project collected linguistic data for spatial relations across a typologically and genetically varied set of languages. In the linguistic analysis, we focus on the ways in which propositions may be functionally equivalent across the linguistic communities while nonetheless representing semantically quite distinctive frames of reference. Running nonlinguistic experiments on subjects from these language communities, we find that a population's cognitive frame of reference correlates with the linguistic frame of reference within the same referential domain.* INTRODUCTION. This study examines the relationship between language and cognition through a crosslinguistic and crosscultural study of spatial reference. Beginning with a crosslinguistic survey of spatial reference in language use, we find systematic variation that contradicts usual assumptions about what must be universal. However, the available number of general spatial systems for describing spatial arrays can be sorted into a few distinctive frames of reference. We focus on two frames of reference: the ABSOLUTE, based on fixed bearings such as north and south, and the RELATIVE, based on projections from the human body such as 'in front (of me)', 'to the left'. In assessing language use, it is not enough to rely on descriptions of languages that are based on conventional elicitation techniques as these may not fully reflect actual socially anchored conventions. We have developed and used director/matcher language games which facilitate interactive discourse between native speakers about spatial relations in tabletop space. The standardized nature of these games allows more exact comparison across languages than is usually possible with conventionally collected discourse. Having observed the variation of language use across communities, we further ask whether there is corresponding conceptual variation-the question of the linguistic relativity of thought. For this, we developed nonlinguistic experiments to determine the speaker's cognitive representations independently of the linguistic data collection. The findings from these experiments clearly demonstrate that a community's use of linguistic coding reliably correlates with the way the individual conceptualizes and memorizes spatial distinctions for nonlinguistic purposes. Because we find linguistic relativity effects in a domain that seems basic to human experience and is directly linked to universally shared perceptual mechanisms, it seems likely that similar correlations between language and thought will be found in other domains as well. 1. A CROSSLINGUISTIC AND CROSSCULTURAL STUDY OF SPATIAL REFERENCE. The primary goal of our project is to test, refine, and reformulate hypotheses about language and human cognition drawing on in-depth information from a broad sample of non-* This article developed from a presentation entitled 'Cultural variation in spatial conceptualization' at

2003

The involutive algebra A corresponds to a given space M like in the classical duality Space Algebra in algebraic geometry' (Alain Connes (1998) 'Noncommutative Geometry and Space-Time'. Ch. 4 in S. A. Huggett, et al., eds.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2010