Language, Cognition and Space: The State of the Art and New Directions

Spatial perception and cognition is fundamental to human abilities to navigate through space, identify and locate objects, and track entities in motion. Moreover, research findings in the last couple of decades reveal that many of the mechanisms humans employ to achieve this are largely innate, providing abilities to store ‘cognitive maps’ for locating themselves and others, locations, directions and routes. In this humans are like many other species. However, unlike other species, humans can employ language in order to represent space. The human linguistic ability combined with the human ability for spatial representation results in rich, creative and sometimes surprising extensions of representations for three-dimensional physical space.

Language, Cognition and Space brings together nineteen articles from leading scholars who investigate the relationship between spatial cognition and spatial language. This volume represents the state of the art in terms of language and space research and points to new directions in terms of findings, theory, and practice.

Vyvyan Evans is Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University. He has written and edited a number of books on cognitive linguistics including: The Semantics of English Prepositions (with Andrea Tyler), The Structure of Time, Cognitive Linguistics (with Melanie Green), and The Cognitive Linguistics Reader (co-edited with Ben Bergen and Joerg Zinken), published by Equinox. Paul Chilton is Professor of Linguistics at the University of East Anglia. He has published widely in the areas of cognitive linguistics and discourse studies including the following books: Security Metaphors: Cold War Discourse from Containment to Common European Home, Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice, and Space, Time and Distance: the Geometry of Discourse.