Spatial Language and Dialogue

This book considers how people talk about the location of objects and places. The book reports on the latest developments in the field of spatial language and sets an agenda for future research on spatial conceptualization and communication in cognitive science, computer science, psychology, and linguistics.

Kenny Coventry is Director of the Cognition and Communication Research Centre, Northumbria University. His research focuses on the relationship between language and perception from a multidisciplinary perspective. He is the author, with Simon Garrod, of Saying, Seeing and Acting: The Psychological Semantics on Spatial Prepositions (2004).
Thora Tenbrink is a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany where she is principal investigator in two projects concerned with the empirical investigation and interpretation of natural spatial language and dialogue. Employing discourse analytic methods, she investigates linguistic reflections of cognitive principles underlying spatial and temporal language usage. She is the author of Space, Time, and the Use of Language (2007).
John Bateman is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany. His research focuses particularly on multilingual and multimodal linguistic description, and computational instantiations of linguistic theory. His current interests centre on the construction of computational dialogue systems for robot-human communication using linguistically-motivated ontologies. He has published widely in these areas and is the author of Multimodal Document Analysis and Genre (2008).