Talking about space: A cross-linguistic perspective
نویسنده
چکیده
What do people attend to when describing the locations of objects in space? This paper describes a study of the ways in which speakers of seventeen languages describe static spatial relations, delving into the meanings of two kinds of spatial relational terms evident crosslinguistically: specific spatial terms and generalized spatial terms. The findings provide support for the importance of geometry, function, and qualitative physics to the meanings of specific spatial terms and suggest an interplay between semantic and pragmatic elements of meaning for generalized spatial terms.
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