Spatial frames of reference in language and thought

Abstract

Stephen C. Levinson, Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity. Series in Language, Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii, 389. Pb $27.99.This is an important book that makes basic arguments of real consequence for current understanding of the relation among language, gesture, and mind. Convincing new experimental and field data from a wide range of languages are used to argue that human spatial cognition is organized into a limited set of types, that cross-linguistic variation in spatial categorization is far more extensive than previously known, and that language structure has a profound, if mediated, influence on thought, gesture, and other modalities of nonlinguistic cognition. Levinson carefully separates linguistic from cognitive analyses in order to trace the relations between them. His book is also an exercise in comparative linguistics, and a strong proposal for a typology of linguistic systems of spatial representation. The scope and strength of the arguments ensure the significance of the book and the debates it has already begun to provoke (see Gallistel 2002, Levinson et al. 2002, Li & Gleitman 2002, Majid 2002).