Chapter 4. Spatial locations and discourse referents

The paper discusses the coding of location and direction with respect to human entities, and analyzes the change undergone by the Latin coding system with its outcomes in the Romance languages. Latin features different coding strategies depending on whether location and direction relate to the interior of a landmark or to its vicinity; the former were used with inanimate landmarks, while the latter could be used with both inanimate and animate (human) ones. Most Romance languages do not continue this opposition. As a consequence, coding strategies for space expressions with human landmarks across the Romance languages display different patterns, which are described and discussed in the paper.

2005

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1993

Fundamental to spatial knowledge in all species are the representations underlying object recognition, object search, and navigation through space. But what sets humans apart from other species is our ability to express spatial experience through language. This target article explores the language of objects and places, asking what geometric properties are preserved in the representations underlying object nouns and spatial prepositions in English. Evidence from these two aspects of language suggests there are significant differences in the geometric richness with which objects and places are encoded. When an object is named (i.e., with count nouns), detailed geometric properties -principally the object's shape (axes, solid and hollow volumes, surfaces, and parts) -are represented. In contrast, when an object plays the role of either "figure" (located object) or "ground" (reference object) in a locational expression, only very coarse geometric object properties are represented, primarily the main axes. In addition, the spatial functions encoded by spatial prepositions tend to be nonmetric and relatively coarse, for example, "containment," "contact," "relative distance," and "relative direction." These properties are representative of other languages as well. The striking differences in the way language encodes objects versus places lead us to suggest two explanations: First, there is a tendency for languages to level out geometric detail from both object and place representations. Second, a nonlinguistic disparity between the representations of "what" and "where" underlies how language represents objects and places. The language of objects and places converges with and enriches our understanding of corresponding spatial representations.

Artificial intelligence II: Methodology …, 1987

2002

This paper is concerned with spatial Frames of Reference as they are expressed in language. Frames of Reference (FoR) may be regarded as spatial coordinate systems. In effect they are strategies for locating a referent (or figure) in relation to a relatum (or ground), on the basis of a search domain projected off the relatum. In the car is in front of/north of the church the car is located in relation to the church, with in front of and north of representing alternative strategies for projecting a search domain off the church. In front of and north of therefore operate in different FoR. Until the 1990s linguistic spatial reference was generally held to be fundamentally egocentric and anthropomorphic. Referents were understood to be located in relation to relata on the basis of a deictic viewpoint or on the basis of a human-like asymmetry assigned to the relatum and treated as intrinsic to it. The fundamental distinction was thus held to be between deictic and intrinsic. Research ove...

Philosophers of language have, at least since Perry (1979), debated the significance of what Stalnaker (2004, et seq) calls the problem of " self-locating over essential indexicals " , in which linguistic elements denoting locations make explicit reference to context and speech acts. The question remains: while a vast variety of the world's languages include means for establishing the location of entities, to what extent do these strategies differ, and how are they related? By the means of contextual elicitation during fieldwork conducted in May of 2017, this paper provides evidence from the Formosan (Austronesian) language of Takibahka Bunun that suggests the need for a formal account of the interpretation of locations in natural language. §1 introduces preliminaries; §2 introduces evidence of locative dependency; and §3 concludes.

Proceedings of the 14th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, 2016

Ainu language, or Aynu itak , is a moribund language or a critically endangered language spoken among indigenous Ainu people in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. In this research, it is argued that a grammatical constraint involved in expressions of place in the Ainu language is well explained by the cognitive-linguistic approach of Reference Point (RP) structure (Langacker 1991, 1993), contributing to the ecological, cultural, and anthropological notions. In the Ainu language, a noun with the locative case is obligatory takes a positional noun, as in "cise oske ta ku=an" [house inside LOC 1SG=be] 'I am inside the house.' On the other hand, there are three cases where such positional nouns are not needed: (i) when used with a preceding demonstrative pronoun, (ii) in a possessive form with a personal affix, (iii) so-called "locative nouns," which semantically indicate the location, and proper nouns or place names. From the cognitive point of view, there are several studies on this issue. Izutsu (2006), for example, claims that the personal affix behaves as an RP (= Reference Point) to indicate a certain spatial realm as a target. The latter analysis employing an RP works fine, but he gives no explanation of the case of "locative nouns" in (iii), especially place names, which seem to indicate no spatial realm or any spatial entity as an RP. For example, place names such as a-ku-pet (we-drink-river) 'the river where we drink' and aykap (cannot) '(where) we cannot (shoot arrows)' do not seem to be relevant to any specific spatial concept. To deal with such cases, it is argued that the certain experience or action that the place affords is interpreted as an RP to indicate the certain spatial realm of the place as a target. On the basis of affordance theory (Gibson 1979), the linguistic expressions can be analyzed to be indications of the information of places that afford certain actions or experiences. For example, a-ku-pet describes the affordance of the river for drinkable water, and aykap describes a portion of the experience of impossibility (negative affordance) to shoot an arrow to the cliff in the distance. Specific locative nouns in addition, like a contrasting example of kim for a mountainous field for hunting vs. nupuri for a mountain as a mere physical object, indicate certain action or experience in daily life as an RP to specify the definite location.

Language and Cognitive Processes, 1988

A word may have the identical conventional meaning in different descriptions and yet be taken as denoting very different things. The proposal we tested is that the denotation of such a word is what the addressee believes it must be in order to contribute to the model of the situation that the speaker intended the addressee to create. We tested this proposal on the verb approach in descriptions schematised by "Figure F is just approaching landmark L for reason R. " The distance from F to L was judged to be larger, all else being equal, the larger the landmark, the larger the figure, the faster the figure was moving, and the farther away the figure could be and still fulfil his or her purpose. We argued that these and other results about word interpretation are best accounted for by listeners creating the intended situation models.

Linguistics and the Human Sciences 9 (2): 200-226., 2013

In this paper we offer a study on the interpretation of plural definites in discourse (the tank engines) and their interaction with spatial adpositions (‘to’ and ‘at’). The novel empirical findings in the paper support the following assumptions on the contribution of spatial adpositions to the interpretation of plural definites. First, the interpretation of plural definites can be influenced by the lexical aspect type of adpositions. While ‘to’ as ‘telic’ predicate can license both a ‘collective’ and a ‘distributive’ reading for plural definites, ‘at’ as an ‘atelic’ predicate only licenses a ‘collective’ reading. Second, the precise lexical content of adpositions determines which interpretation is accessed. It is claimed that ‘at’ denotes a ‘general location’ relation between locatum and landmark object, and thus licenses a collective reading for plural definites.