Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity

by Stephen C. Levinson

Overview

Spatial orientation and direction are core areas of human and animal thinking. But, unlike animals, human populations vary considerably in their spatial thinking. Revealing that these differences correlate with language (which is probably mostly responsible for the different cognitive styles), this book includes many cross-cultural studies investigating spatial memory, reasoning, types of gesture and wayfinding abilities. It explains the relationship between language and cognition and cross-cultural differences in thinking to students of language and the cognitive sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521812627
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/20/2003
Series:	Language Culture and Cognition , #5
Pages:	414
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.06(d)

About the Author

Stephen C. Levinson is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Professor of Comparative Linguistics at the University of Nijmegen. His publications include Pragmatics (Cambridge, 1983), Politeness (co-author Cambridge, 1987), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (co-editor, Cambridge, 1996), Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development (co-editor, Cambridge, 2001) and Presumptive Meaning (2001).

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. The intellectual background: two millenia of Western ideas about spatial thinking; 2. Frames of reference; 3. Linguistic diversity; 4. Absolute minds: glimpses into two cultures; 5. Diversity in mind: methods and results from a cross-linguistic sample; 6. Beyond language: frames of reference in wayfinding and pointing; 7. Language and thought.

Editorial Reviews

"A fundamental part of this new-Whorfian movement has been Stephen Levinson's thinking about spatial language and cognition. It is valuable to have most of his arguments and data gathered together in this thought-provoking book."
-Nora S. Newcombe, Human Development

"Levinson's book will certainly stand as a textbook in the study of the relationship between language and cognition, and is rich and challenging reading...Those with an interest in the issue of linguistic variation will find an unusually well-documented and well-argued presentation of the actual variation in the domain of spatial reference."
-Ingjerd Hoem, Institute for Pacific Archaeology and Cultural History, The Kon-Tiki Museum, Anthropological Linguistics

From the Publisher