What is it about?
The paper looks at how the Oceanic language Äiwoo uses forms that refer to direction of motion ('hither', 'thither', 'up', 'down' etc) to talk about relations between things that don't move ('X is above/below/inside Y'). It finds that the language uses combinations of such directional terms to talk about stative relations in a way that suggests that these relations are thought of as a kind metaphorical motion: if X is below Y, then it is moving up towards Y, if it is above Y, then it is moving down towards Y, etc.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Understanding how people talk about space in different cultures can help us understand how humans think about space and how we orient ourselves in space. The particular way that Äiwoo does this seems to be very rare and so can add to our knowledge of how people talk and think about space.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Standing up to the canoe: Competing cognitive biases in the encoding of stative spatial relations in a language with a single spatial preposition, Cognitive Linguistics, November 2018, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/cog-2017-0096.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
