Book Review: Interpreting Motion: Grounded Representations for Spatial Language by Inderjeet Mani and James Pustejovsky

Inderjeet Mani and James Pustejovsky present a documentation of the state of the art with respect to the formal and computational representation of motion concepts expressed in language (mostly English). Starting from the conceptual properties represented in the linguistic repertory of motion, they provide an overview of existing formalisms and annotation approaches, ultimately moving towards automatic approaches and computational applications. The book is timely in its representation of the current understanding of motion concepts in language, and will therefore be of great interest in the computational and cognitive linguistics communities. Why, one may ask, do we need a better understanding of motion? It might seem that motion is just one of many human concepts expressed by a number of linguistic terms, which are adequately described by their lexical entries in anybody’s dictionary. Mani and Pustejovsky’s analysis of the linguistic representation of motion suggests a very different idea, however. Far from representing just one marginal aspect of human language, the conceptualization and verbalization of motion turns out to be central to human life—and, as a consequence, central to communication. Motion combines the two fundamental human concepts of space and time. Space without time is, for humans, asmeaningless as timewithout space. Both are inextricably linked—and this link ismost notably and systematically represented in language via expressions of motion. Motion is represented whenever aspects of life are described, reflecting its deep relevance for human thinking. Any computational approach towards interpreting natural language representation will, sooner or later, need to deal with motion concepts. Interpreting motion, therefore, turns out to be one of the most fundamental research issues for a variety of purposes both in basic (or cognitive) and applied (or computational) research.