Space in Language and Cognition

Stephen C. Levinson is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Professor of Comparative Linguistics at the University of Nijmegen. His publications include Pragmatics (Cambridge, 1983), Politeness (co-author Cambridge, 1987), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (co-editor, Cambridge, 1996), Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development (co-editor, Cambridge, 2001) and Presumptive Meaning (2001).

• Preface; 1. The intellectual background: two millenia of Western ideas about spatial thinking; 2. Frames of reference; 3. Linguistic diversity; 4. Absolute minds: glimpses into two cultures; 5. Diversity in mind: methods and results from a cross-linguistic sample; 6. Beyond language: frames of reference in wayfinding and pointing; 7. Language and thought.

"A fundamental part of this new-Whorfian movement has been Stephen Levinson's thinking about spatial language and cognition. It is valuable to have most of his arguments and data gathered together in this thought-provoking book." -Nora S. Newcombe, Human Development