A cross-linguistic study of grammatical morphemes expressing spatial relationships that discusses the relationship between the way human beings experience space and the way it is encoded grammatically in language. The discussion of the similarities and differences among languages in the encoding and expression of spatial relations centers around the emergence and evolution of spatial grams, and the semantic and morphosyntactic characteristics of two types of spatial grams. The author bases her observations on the study of data from 26 genetically unrelated and randomly selected languages. It is shown that languages are similar in the way spatial grams emerge and evolve, and also in the way specific types of spatial grams are used to express not only spatial but also temporal and other non-spatial relations. Motivation for these similarities may lie in the way we, as human beings, experience the world, which is constrained by our physical configuration and neurophysiological apparatus, as well as our individual cultures.

This book brings together three perspectives on language and space that are quite well-researched within themselves, but which so far are lacking productive interconnections. Specifically, the book aims to interconnect the following research areas: Language, space, and geography Grammar, space, and cognition Language and interactional spaces The contributions in this book cover geographical language variation within and across languages, language use in stationary and mobile interactional spaces, computer-mediated communication, and spatial reasoning across languages. This range of issues showcases the thematic and methodological breadth of research on language and space. In order to identify interconnections, the respective contributions are accompanied by commentaries that highlight common threads.

In the highly influential mental-spaces framework developed by Gilles Fauconnier in the mid-1980s, the mind creates multiple cognitive "spaces" to mediate its understanding of relations and activities in the world, and to engage in creative thought. These twelve original papers extend the mental-spaces framework and demonstrate its utility in solving deep problems in linguistics and discourse theory. Investigating the ties between mental constructs, they analyze a wide range of phenomena, including analogical counterfactuals; the metaphor system for conceptualizing the self; abstract change expressions in Japanese; mood in Spanish; deictic expressions; copular sentences in Japanese; conditional constructions; and reference in American Sign Language. The ground-breaking research presented in this volume will be of interest to linguists and cognitive scientists. The contributors are Claudia Brugman, Gilles Fauconnier, George Lakoff, Yo Matsumoto, Errapel Mejias-Bikandi, Laura A. Michaelis, Gisela Redeker, Jo Rubba, Shigeru Sakahara, Jose Sanders, Eve Sweetser, and Karen van Hoek.

This monograph contains the first systematic investigation of the Japanese 'dative subject' construction across time and space. It demonstrates that, in order to capture what speakers/writers know about how to put an utterance or a clause together, it is necessary to pay attention to what they do in actual language use and in different discourse types. The work also shows the importance of diachronic perspectives to help us better understand the ways in which a particular grammatical structure is represented synchronically. By utilizing modern Japanese conversation, contemporary Japanese novels, and a pre-modern and modern Japanese literature corpus, the study highlights the role of 'dative subjects' at the semantic and discourse-pragmatic levels. Specifically, it demonstrates that what has been considered to be a most 'grammatical' aspect of Japanese actually turns out to be rather pragmatically oriented.

The papers of this volume investigate how grammar codes the subjective viewpoint of human language users, that is, how grammar reflects human conceptualization. Some of the articles deal with spatial relations and locations. They discuss how basic attributes of human conceptualization are encoded in the grammatical expression of spatial relations. Other articles concern embodiment in language, showing how conceptualization is mediated by one's embodied experience of the world and ourselves. Finally, some of the articles discuss coding of person focusing on the subjec­tivity of conceptualization and how it is reflected in grammar. The articles show that conceptualization reflects the speaker's construal of the situation, and furthermore, that it is intersubjective because it reflects the speaker's understanding of the relations between the speech act participants. The papers deal with Finnish, utilizing the rich resources of Finnish grammar to contribute to issues in contemporary linguistics and in particular to Cognitive Grammar.

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.

How do people know where in the world they are? How do they find their way about? These are the sort of questions about spatial orientation with which this book is concerned. Staying spatially oriented is a pervasive aspect of all be havior. Animals must find their way through their environ ment searching efficiently for food and returning to their home areas and many species have developed very sophisticated sensing apparatus for helping them do this. Even little children know their way around quite complex environments. They remember where they put things and are able to retrieve them with little trouble. Adults in societies across the world have developed complex navigational systems for help ing them find their way over long distances with few dis tinctive landmarks. People across the world use their langu ages to communicate about spatial orientation in problems of simple direction giving and spatial descriptions as well as problems of long range navigation.