The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition

The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition PDF Author: Michel Aurnague
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027223746
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
Despite a growing interest for space in language, most research has focused on spatial markers specifying the static or dynamic relationships among entities (verbs, prepositions, postpositions, case markings ). Little attention has been paid to the very properties of spatial entities, their status in linguistic descriptions, and their implications for spatial cognition and its development in children. This topic is at the center of this book, that opens a new field by sketching some major theoretical and methodological directions for future research on spatial entities. Brought together linguistic descriptions of spatial systems, formal accounts of linguistic data, and experimental findings from psycholinguistic studies, all couched within a wide cross-linguistic perspective. Such an interdisciplinary approach provides a rich overview of the many questions that remain unanswered in relation to spatial entities, while also throwing a new light on previous research focusing on related topics concerning space and/or the relation between language and cognition.

The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition

The Categorization of Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition PDF Author: Michel Aurnague
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027223746
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
Despite a growing interest for space in language, most research has focused on spatial markers specifying the static or dynamic relationships among entities (verbs, prepositions, postpositions, case markings ). Little attention has been paid to the very properties of spatial entities, their status in linguistic descriptions, and their implications for spatial cognition and its development in children. This topic is at the center of this book, that opens a new field by sketching some major theoretical and methodological directions for future research on spatial entities. Brought together linguistic descriptions of spatial systems, formal accounts of linguistic data, and experimental findings from psycholinguistic studies, all couched within a wide cross-linguistic perspective. Such an interdisciplinary approach provides a rich overview of the many questions that remain unanswered in relation to spatial entities, while also throwing a new light on previous research focusing on related topics concerning space and/or the relation between language and cognition.

Constructions in Cognitive Contexts

Constructions in Cognitive Contexts PDF Author: Franziska Günther
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311046134X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Get Book Here

Book Description
In what ways are language, cognition and perception interrelated? Do they influence each other? This book casts a fresh light on these questions by putting individual speakers’ cognitive contexts, i.e. their usage-preferences and entrenched patterns of linguistic knowledge, into the focus of investigation. It presents findings from original experimental research on spatial language use which indicate that these individual-specific factors indeed play a central role in determining whether or not differences in the current and/or habitual linguistic behaviour of speakers of German and English are systematically correlated with differences in non-linguistic behaviour (visual attention allocation to and memory for spatial referent scenes). These findings form the basis of a new, speaker-focused usage-based model of linguistic relativity, which defines language-perception/cognition effects as a phenomenon which primarily occurs within individual speakers rather than between speakers or speech communities.

Development of Geocentric Spatial Language and Cognition

Development of Geocentric Spatial Language and Cognition PDF Author: Pierre R. Dasen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139488007
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
Egocentric spatial language uses coordinates in relation to our body to talk about small-scale space ('put the knife on the right of the plate and the fork on the left'), while geocentric spatial language uses geographic coordinates ('put the knife to the east, and the fork to the west'). How do children learn to use geocentric language? And why do geocentric spatial references sound strange in English when they are standard practice in other languages? This book studies child development in Bali, India, Nepal, and Switzerland and explores how children learn to use a geocentric frame both when speaking and performing non-verbal cognitive tasks (such as remembering locations and directions). The authors examine how these skills develop with age, look at the socio-cultural contexts in which the learning takes place, and explore the ecological, cultural, social, and linguistic conditions that favor the use of a geocentric frame of reference.

Space and Time in Languages and Cultures

Space and Time in Languages and Cultures PDF Author: Luna Filipovi?
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027273618
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 510

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume offers novel insights into linguistic diversity in the domains of spatial and temporal reference, searching for uniformity amongst diversity. A number of authors discuss expression of dynamic spatial relations cross-linguistically in a vast range of typologically different languages such as Bezhta, French, Hinuq, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbian, and Spanish, among others. The contributions on linguistic expression of time all shed new light on pertinent questions regarding this cognitive domain, such as the hotly debated relationship between cross-linguistic differences in talking about time and universal principles of utterance interpretation, modelling temporal inference through aspectual interactions, as well as the complexity of the acquisition of tense-aspect relations in a second language. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Language, culture, and cognition (HCP 37) which discusses spatial and temporal constructs in human language, cognition, and culture in order to come closer to a better understanding of the interaction between shared and individual characteristics of language and culture that shape the way people interact with each other and exchange information about the spatio-temporal constructs that underlie their cognitive, social, and linguistic foundations.

Space and Time in Language and Literature

Space and Time in Language and Literature PDF Author: Lovorka Gruić Grmuša
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443815098
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Get Book Here

Book Description
Space and time, their infiniteness and/or their limit(ation)s, their coding, conceptualization and the relationship between the two, have been intriguing people for millennia. Linguistics and literature are no exceptions in this sense. This book brings together eight essays which all deal with the expression of space and/or time in language and/or literature. The book explores the issues of space, time and their interrelation from two different perspectives: the linguistic and the literary. The first section—Time and Space in Language—contains four papers which focus on linguistics, i.e. explore issues relative to the expression of time and space in natural languages. The topics under consideration include: typology regarding the expression of spatial information in languages around the world (Ch.1), space as expressed and conceptualized in neutral, postural and verbs of fictive motion (Ch. 2), prepositional semantics (Ch.3), aspectuality (in Tamil, Ch. 4). All articles propose innovative topics and/or approaches, crossreferring when possible between space and time. Given that all seem to propose at least some elements of “language universality” vs. “language variability”, the strong cognitivist nature of the approach (even when the paper is not written within a cognitive linguistic framework) represents a particularly strong feature of the section, with a strong appeal to experts from fields that need not necessarily be linguistic. The second section of this volume—Space and Time in Literature—brings together four essays dealing with literary topics. Inherent in each narrative are both temporal and spatial implications because a literary text testifies of a certain time, it is from and about a certain period, as well as about a certain space, even if virtual. A particularly strong feature of these papers is that they envision space and time as complementary parameters of experience and not as conceptual opposites, following the transfer of perspective through the whole century. Departing from the late nineteenth century England’s and Croatia’s fictive spaces (Ch. 5), the topic moves via the American Southern Gothic, focusing on Faulkner from the thirties to the early sixties (Ch. 6), via the post-WWII perspectives on history, probing the postmodern context of temporality (Ch 7), to finally reach the contemporary era of post 9/11 space-time (Ch 8). The voyage from chapter five to eight is thus a journey through space and time that allows for some answers to the nature of reality (of a variety of space-times) as conceived by both the authors of these essays as well as by the authors that these essays discuss. The main goal of the editors has been to bring together different scientific traditions which can contribute complementary concerns and methodologies to the issues under exam; from the literary and descriptive via the diachronic and typological explorations all the way to cognitive (linguistic) analyses, bordering psycholinguistics and neuroscience. One of the strengths of this volume thus lies in the diversity of perspectives articulated within it, where the agreements, but also the controversies and divergences demonstrate constant changes in society which, in turn, shapes our views of space-time/reality. All this also suggests that science and literature are not above or apart from their culture, but embedded within it, and that there exists a strong relativistic interrelation between (spatio-temporal) reality and culture. The only hope to objectively envisage any if not all of the above, is by learning how to move (our thought) through space, time or, to put it in simpler terms, how to shift perspectives.

Space in Languages

Space in Languages PDF Author: Maya Hickmann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027229775
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
Space is presently the focus of much research and debate across disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. One strong feature of this collection is to bring together theoretical and empirical contributions from these varied scientific traditions, with the collective aim of addressing fundamental questions at the forefront of the current literature: the nature of space in language, the linguistic relativity of space, the relation between spatial language and cognition. Linguistic analyses highlight the multidimensional and heterogeneous nature of space, while also showing the existence of a set of types, parameters, and principles organizing the considerable diversity of linguistic systems and accounting for mechanisms of diachronic change. Findings concerning spatial perception and cognition suggest the existence of two distinct systems governing linguistic and non-linguistic representations, that only partially overlap in some pathologies, but they also show the strong impact of language-specific factors on the course of language acquisition and cognitive development.

Language-Specific Factors in First Language Acquisition

Language-Specific Factors in First Language Acquisition PDF Author: Anne-Katharina Harr
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 1614511748
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book Here

Book Description
A growing number of studies have begun to examine the influence of language-specific factors on language acquisition. During language acquisition, German children from six years on use structures that are similar to those of adults in their language group and also encode all semantic components from an early age. In striking contrast, French children up to ten years have difficulties producing some of the complex structures that are necessary for the simultaneous expression of several semantic components. Nonetheless, in addition to these striking cross-linguistic differences, the results of this study also clearly show similar developmental progressions in other respects, suggesting the impact of general developmental determinants.

Metaphorical Landscapes and the Theology of the Book of Job

Metaphorical Landscapes and the Theology of the Book of Job PDF Author: Johan de Joode
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004388877
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
Metaphorical Landscapes and the Theology of the Book of Job demonstrates how spatial metaphors play a crucial role in the theology of the book of Job. Themes as pivotal as trauma, ill-being, retribution, and divine character are conceptualized in terms of space; its imagery is thus dependent on spatial configurations, such as boundaries, distance, direction, containment, and contact. Not only are spatial metaphors ubiquitous in the book of Job—possibly the most frequent conceptual metaphors in the book—they are essential to its theological reasoning. Job’s spatial metaphors form a metaphorical landscape in which God’s character and his creation are challenged in unprecedented ways. In the theophany, God reacts to that landscape. This book introduces a pragmatic synthesis of both conceptual metaphor theory and spatial semantics and it demonstrates their exegetical and hermeneutic potential.

The Semantics of Dynamic Space in French

The Semantics of Dynamic Space in French PDF Author: Michel Aurnague
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027262500
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book Here

Book Description
Research on the semantics of spatial markers in French is known mainly through Vandeloise’s (1986, 1991) work on static prepositions. However, interest in the expression of space in French goes back to the mid-1970s and focused first on verbs denoting changes in space, whose syntactic properties were related to specific semantic distinctions, such as the opposition between “movement” and “displacement”. This volume provides an overview of recent studies on the semantics of dynamic space in French and addresses important questions about motion expression, among which “goal bias” and asymmetry of motion, the status of locative PPs, the expression of manner, fictive or non-actual motion. Descriptive, experimental and formal or computational analyses are presented, providing complementary perspectives on the main issue. The volume is intended for researchers and advanced students wishing to learn about both spatial semantics in French and recent debates on the representation of motion events in language and cognition.

Daily Spatial Mobilities

Daily Spatial Mobilities PDF Author: Aharon Kellerman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317154991
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discussing the concept of mobility at large and that of spatial mobilities in particular, this book makes the case for daily spatial mobilities as a distinct type of mobility and explores this concept from a variety of perspectives. Daily mobilities, such as for commuting, shopping, social ties, information, banking, news, studies, business meetings, etc. are typified by their being two-way mobilities, frequently performed, constituting a major element of our daily routine lives, and inclusive of both corporeal and/or virtual mobilities. Outlining his argument for daily spatial mobility, author Aharon Kellerman focuses on needs and triggers for daily mobilities, on levels of personal mobility and personal autonomy in daily mobilities and on potential mobilities leading to practiced ones. The concept is further explored using three major types of daily mobility, terrestrial, virtual and aerial and three major spatial elements; urban spatial reorganization in the information age, mobility terminals, namely bus, metro, and railway stations as well as airports, and global opportunities through daily mobilities, notably for users of the Internet.