Levinson Stephen С. Space in Language and Cognition

Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. – Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. – 389 p.Stephen С. Levinson is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Professor of Comparative Linguistics at the University of Nijmegen. Space in language and cognition is one of the books in the series devoted to the relation between language and spatial cognition that emerged out of the work of the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, that is based on in-depth field analysis of over forty, mostly unwritten languages spoken in small-scale, traditional societies, and collaborative, interdisciplinary research, involving anthropologists, linguists and psychologists, conducted in many languages and cultures around the world. This book is especially concerned with just one aspect of spatial cognition, namely frames of reference as expressed in spatial language and everyday thinking. According to the author, this book has two main goals. First, it serves as an introduction to an important subject – spatial coordinate systems in language and cognition – which has not generally been treated in a unified way, but rather conceptualized differently in different disciplines. Secondly, the book asks searching questions about the general nature of the relation between language and thought, or linguistic coding and non-linguistic categories. The major discovery that is documented in the book is that differences between languages in the semantic parameters utilized in spatial description correlate with, and seem to induce, major differences in spatial cognition across human groups. The author suggests that most current thinking in the cognitive sciences underestimates the transformative power of language on thinking. This book shows that even in a core cognitive domain, such as spatial thinking, language influences how people think, memorize and reason about spatial relations and directions.