Lexical Splits and Asymmetries Spatial Referencing: Revealing Universals through the Study of Variation

Introduction Early studies in the linguistic representation of space were commonly inspired by bewildering cross-linguistic diversity; they sought to systematize that diversity and to understand its underlying principles. The theoretical fruitfulness of these efforts notwithstanding, much stands to be gained by looking closely at patterns of variation that recur with surprising regularity in language after language but have not so far received much attention from typologists. In this paper, I explore three of the major aspects of cross-linguistic variation, focusing on the ways alternative strategies co-exist within one language. I believe that by shifting the emphasis from sweeping typologies to language-internal variation new insight can be gained into the way different cognitive strategies compete for becoming conventionalized in grammar and usage. In addition to traditional typological methods, such exploration requires the use of corpora, experimental techniques, and sometimes tools for fine-grained quantitative data analysis. In this talk I try to highlight the way general principles of spatial representation are reflected, in different languages, in lexical asymmetries, usage tendencies, and regularities in language change.