ABSTRACT
Some animals develop a sophisticated spatial knowledge necessary for way-finding, migrating, establishing the boundaries of their territory, nesting and so on. However, only humans are able to share their spatial knowledge by using language to communicate. This chapter addresses the issue of spatial communication with a focus on the mental representations that underlie our locative expressions and, more generally, spatial discourse. All languages have a rich vocabulary of locative terms that cover several linguistic categories. For instance, in English and in most Indo-European languages there are spatial adverbials (e.g., “here”, “there”, “behind”, “below”), prepositions (e.g., “in”, “on”, “from”, “near”), adjectives (e.g., “big”, “short”, “large”), pronouns (e.g., “this”, “that”), nouns (e.g., “circle”, “square”, “triangle”), and verbs (e.g., “to enter”, “to leave”, “to jump”, “to cross”, “to support”, “to contain”). Some of these locatives are particularly important because they are closed-class words (e.g., prepositions) or, in some languages like German, morphological flexions (case affixes) that convey spatial meaning. Closed-class words and morphological flexions correspond to concepts incorporated into the grammar of a language, and their use is frequently mandatory in sentences. Only a few concepts enter the closed-class category of words or become grammaticalised. Thus, in many languages, time, person, quantity, or gender are incorporated into the grammar. Some spatial concepts also belong to this privileged “club” although their use in each sentence is generally optional rather than mandatory (unlike other concepts such as time incorporated in verb tenses, or quantity implicit in number morphemes).
