Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
4 Inside in and on: typological and psycholinguistic perspectives
Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
Michelle I. Feist
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Description
In this chapter, the author sketches the view through two windows onto the landscape of spatial cognition: one being that of a semantic typologist; the other, that of a psycholinguist. The evidence gathered by looking through these two windows will suggest that despite surface differences in how we talk about space, all humans are attuned to the same three abstract families of factors – geometric, functional, and qualitative physical – which together influence the ways in which we talk about relations in space. This chapter examines each of these families of factors in turn, along with limitations on proposed meanings based on a single type of factor.