This course is about the relation between language, space and time. Spatial cognition is at the heart of our thinking, as spatial thinking provides us with analogies and tools for understanding the world around us. The space further extends its meanings into the domain of time. The association between space and time is arguably a human universal, documented, as preceding the development of language. This space-time linkage is reflected in linguistic metaphors the world over but also in non-linguistic artifacts, conventions and other manifestations of human culture and cognition.
Primary reading:
Levinsohn, S. C. (2004). Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Senft, G. (Ed.) (1997). Referring to space: Studies in Austronesian and Papuan languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Admiraal, F. (2016). A grammar of space in Baure: A study on the linguistic encoding of spatial reference. (PhD dissertation), LOT, Utrecht.
+ several papers on the topic