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Description:
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Despite a growing interest for space in language, most research has focused
on spatial markers specifying the static or dynamic relationships among
entities (verbs, prepositions, postpositions, case markings'). Little
attention has been paid to the very properties of spatial entities, their
status in linguistic descriptions, and their implications for spatial
cognition and its development in children. This topic is at the center of
this book, that opens a new field by sketching some major theoretical and
methodological directions for future research on spatial entities. Brought
together linguistic descriptions of spatial systems, formal accounts of
linguistic data, and experimental findings from psycholinguistic studies,
all couched within a wide cross-linguistic perspective. Such an
interdisciplinary approach provides a rich overview of the many questions
that remain unanswered in relation to spatial entities, while also throwing
a new light on previous research focusing on related topics concerning
space and/or the relation between language and cognition.
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