Spatial orientation is crucial when we try to navigate the world around us. It is a fundamental domain of human experience and depends on a wide array of cognitive capacities and integrated neural subsystems. What is most important for spatial cognition however, are the frames of references we use to locate and classify ourselves, others, objects, and events.
Often, we define a landmark (say ourselves, or a tree, or the telly) and then define an object's location in relation to this landmark. (the mouse is to my right, the bike lies left of the tree, my keys have fallen behind the telly). But as it turns out, many languages are not able to express a coordinate system with the meaning of the English expression “left of.” Instead, they employ a compass-like system of orientation.
They do not use a relative frame of reference, like in the English “the cat is behind the truck” but instead use an absolute frame of reference that can be illustrated in English by sentences such as “the cat is north of the truck.” (Levinson 2003: 3). This may seem exotic for us, but for many languages it is the dominant – although often not the only – way of locating things in space.
What are the cognitive consequences of this? Levinson argues that “
Levinson has done much work on two languages which feature absolute frames of references:
1. Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian Aboriginal language. Levinson recounts how a Guugu Yimithirr speaker once warned him of an army ant “north of his” foot, or how another one told him where to find the frozen fish in a store that was 45 kilometres away. He pointed to his left and Levinson, just as all speakers of Indo-European and many other languages would probably do, thought he meant that Levinson would find the frozen fish on his right-hand side when he entered the shop. But in fact, he had pointed north-east and intended to communicate to Levinson that he would find the frozen fish in the north-east corner of the shop.
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2. Tzeltal, a Mayan language. In Tzeltal, speakers use the hills that surround them as points of reference. If they are out of the hills, they still project their frame of reference on their environment. So a speaker asking “Is the hot water in the uphill tap?” in an unfamiliar hotel out of the hills would mean by this ‘Is the hot water in the tap that would lie in the uphill (southerly) direction if I were at home?’ (Levinson 2003: 4).
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Levinson was particularly impressed by a Guugu Yimithirr speaker who, when referring to a absent person, seemingly pointed at himself but in fact pointed to the place the person had lived before. For Levinson, this indicates that
These experiences fit perfectly into and are supported by a more thorough and experimental investigation of this matter. But they fly in the face of much of traditional western thinking on the topic, including the consensus on the nature of spatial thinking in much of cognitive science, psychology, and linguistics which held that it was organized in a relative, egocentric and anthropocentric manner. (Levinson 2003: 10f.).
And in the chapters of his book Levinson sums up a robust body of data that lend support to his thesis that spatial cognition may be differently organised in different cultures, and that the body may not be the fundamental source of our spatial concepts, neither developmentally nor cross-culturally.
However, there are still strong universal trends in cognition in the domain of space. According to Levinson the best way to accommodate all these findings is to concede that human cognition may employ several modes of internal representation and that there is no reason to assume that there is only one form of mental representation. If we accept this view, it seems much more logical to state that the internal representations accessed by and linked to language and cultural practices are in some way influenced and shaped by these linkages. (Levinson 2003: 21f.).
Levinson sums up the key issues that recur throughout his book as follows:
Often, we define a landmark (say ourselves, or a tree, or the telly) and then define an object's location in relation to this landmark. (the mouse is to my right, the bike lies left of the tree, my keys have fallen behind the telly). But as it turns out, many languages are not able to express a coordinate system with the meaning of the English expression “left of.” Instead, they employ a compass-like system of orientation.
They do not use a relative frame of reference, like in the English “the cat is behind the truck” but instead use an absolute frame of reference that can be illustrated in English by sentences such as “the cat is north of the truck.” (Levinson 2003: 3). This may seem exotic for us, but for many languages it is the dominant – although often not the only – way of locating things in space.What are the cognitive consequences of this? Levinson argues that “
the choice of a predominant frame of reference in language correlates with, and probably determines, many other aspects of cognition, from memory, to inference, to navigation, to gesture and beyond. “ (Levinson 2003: 3).
Levinson has done much work on two languages which feature absolute frames of references:
1. Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian Aboriginal language. Levinson recounts how a Guugu Yimithirr speaker once warned him of an army ant “north of his” foot, or how another one told him where to find the frozen fish in a store that was 45 kilometres away. He pointed to his left and Levinson, just as all speakers of Indo-European and many other languages would probably do, thought he meant that Levinson would find the frozen fish on his right-hand side when he entered the shop. But in fact, he had pointed north-east and intended to communicate to Levinson that he would find the frozen fish in the north-east corner of the shop.
Größere Kartenansicht
2. Tzeltal, a Mayan language. In Tzeltal, speakers use the hills that surround them as points of reference. If they are out of the hills, they still project their frame of reference on their environment. So a speaker asking “Is the hot water in the uphill tap?” in an unfamiliar hotel out of the hills would mean by this ‘Is the hot water in the tap that would lie in the uphill (southerly) direction if I were at home?’ (Levinson 2003: 4).
Größere Kartenansicht
Levinson was particularly impressed by a Guugu Yimithirr speaker who, when referring to a absent person, seemingly pointed at himself but in fact pointed to the place the person had lived before. For Levinson, this indicates that
“in some striking way, the ego has been reduced to an abstract point in space. (Levinson 2003: 5)”
These experiences fit perfectly into and are supported by a more thorough and experimental investigation of this matter. But they fly in the face of much of traditional western thinking on the topic, including the consensus on the nature of spatial thinking in much of cognitive science, psychology, and linguistics which held that it was organized in a relative, egocentric and anthropocentric manner. (Levinson 2003: 10f.).
And in the chapters of his book Levinson sums up a robust body of data that lend support to his thesis that spatial cognition may be differently organised in different cultures, and that the body may not be the fundamental source of our spatial concepts, neither developmentally nor cross-culturally.
However, there are still strong universal trends in cognition in the domain of space. According to Levinson the best way to accommodate all these findings is to concede that human cognition may employ several modes of internal representation and that there is no reason to assume that there is only one form of mental representation. If we accept this view, it seems much more logical to state that the internal representations accessed by and linked to language and cultural practices are in some way influenced and shaped by these linkages. (Levinson 2003: 21f.).
Levinson sums up the key issues that recur throughout his book as follows:
- “What are the ‘natural’, pre-linguistic or innate, spatial concepts in human cognition? How abstract are they? Why does spatial thinking have a centrality in human cognition?
- What is the role of bodily axes and coordinates in spatial cognition?
- What is the nature of the relation between linguistic categories and non-linguistic concepts, both in general and in the spatial domain? Are there a multiplicity of underlying representations, or one multimodal representation of space? If the latter, what is its relation to spatial semantics?
- How much linguistic diversity is there in this domain, not only in expressive form, but underlying semantic parameters? Given that there is diversity, what linguistic universals can be stated in this area?
- Given semantic diversity, what happens to the underlying cognition? Does it remain a universal constant, translated into various restricted linguistic concepts, or does it adapt to the language it must locally support?
- What are the general implications from the spatial domain for the relation between language and human thinking?” (Levinson 2003: 22f.)
References:
Levinson, Stephen C. (2003) Space in Language and Cognition : Explorations in Cognitive Diversity. West Nyack, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
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