Language, Space and Mind

What is it about?

Spatial cognition provides the foundation of linguistic meaning. All speakers are conceptualizers who have a point of view, with a perspective in space, time and what seems real to them. The book examines the spatial basis of tense, modality, counterfactuality, other minds and concepts of moral force. It argues that simple geometrical tools (vectors in coordinate systems) are a natural way to model linguistic concepetualizations. And it makes links to cognitive science and neuroscience.

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Why is it important?

It pushes further than elsewhere in cognitive linguistics the proposal that it is spatial cognition that underlies the conceptualizations that are enabled by the structures of a human language. It develops a completely new formalism to this end: the simple geometrical ideas of coordinates and vectors. After all, if spatial concepts underly linguistic meaning, it makes sense to use the tools we already have for describing space as we experience it.