Semantic Typology and Spatial Conceptualization
Eric R. A. Pederson, Stephen C. Levinson, Eve Danziger, Sotaro Kita, David P. Wilkins, Gunter Senft · Language · 1998
This project collected linguistic data for spatial relations across a typologically and genetically varied set of languages. In the linguistic analysis, we focus on the ways in which propositions may be functionally equivalent across the linguistic communities while nonetheless representing semantically quite distinctive frames of reference. Running nonlinguistic experiments on subjects from these language communities, we find that a population’s cognitive frame of reference correlates with the linguistic frame of reference within the same referential domain.