Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
7 Genesis of spatial terms
Language, Cognition and Space - The State of the Art and New Directions - Vyvyan Evans
Claude Vandeloise
Louisiana State University
Description
This chapter is divided in four sections: section 1 establishes a contrast between what the author calls external lexical formation, in which a word is associated to an extra-linguistic concept, and internal lexical formation, that proceeds by division or union of established lexical categories. In section 2, the author discusses a hierarchy in the formation of spatial terms in languages of the world. Three modes of lexicon development are investigated in section 3. In section 4, the author attempts to explain how the different levels of abstraction of spatial words can influence the acquisition of spatial words.