Introduction: spatial language, cognition and environment

Abstract

The languages of the world offer their speakers different means of encoding spatial information and of grounding utterances geographically by pointing to the surrounding landscape. Languages vary both in the spatial concepts they require their speakers to hold and in the degree of routine attention to the physical environment they demand. The five papers in this special issue illustrate crosslinguistic variation in coding strategies for spatial notions as well as methods for investigating such variation, two key themes for the conference Geographic Grounding: Place, direction and landscape in the grammars of the world, held in Copenhagen 30–31May 2016, where the content and perspectives of the five papers were first presented. This issue comprises studies in spatial coding strategies in West Greenlandic (Inuit, Greenland), Icelandic (Germanic, Iceland), Faroese (Germanic, the Faroe Islands), Kalasha and Palula (both Indo-Aryan, Pakistan), Diidxazá (Zapotecan, Mexico), Acazulco Otomí (Otopamean, Mexico) and Mexican Spanish (Romance, Mexico), and the contributions share a keen interest in contextualizing these strategies. On the one hand, the papers examine interdependencies between spatial subsystems within a language that either reinforce or supplement one another. On the other, they investigate the possible influence from spatial language on spatial cognition as well as the possible effects of geography and cultural practices on the structure of space-marking systems.