Cultural conceptualisations and spatial cognition in Ghanaian English

Abstract

AbstractKantian philosophy describes space as a universal cognitive primitive because all humans contend with attributes of space as they navigate their environments and communicate the location of things or their location in relation to the location of things. These spatial conceptualisations are encoded in human language and their grammars as either prepositions or postpositions, where different cultures and languages conceptualise space differently because of their different environments. It also means that linguistic terms about spatial relations, such as prepositions, contain not only linguistic information but also conceptual information as well as cultural schemas. This paper explores the variations in the use of prepositions in Ghanaian English and argues that such variations, which may contribute to marking off the variety of English spoken in Ghana as a distinct variety, may be motivated by the cultural conceptualisations of relational terms in the primary language(s)/culture(s) of the speakers of Ghanaian English.