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Description:
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This book examines spatial language in sign languages (Turkish Sign
Language, Croatian Sign Language, American Sign Language, and Austrian Sign
Language) and spoken languages (Turkish, English, and Croatian). The book
presents a novel model, the Crossmodal Spatial Language, to account for
similarities and differences in these languages. The model, which consists
of Spatial Representations, Reference Frames, Temporal Representations,
Conceptual Structure, and Linguistic Representations, shows that the
features from spatial input are not necessarily mapped on the spatial
descriptions regardless of modality and language.
The book reports several studies to examine the descriptions of static and
dynamic spatial scenes which involve, among others, spatial relationals
such as left-right, front-back, besides, in, on, to, toward, pass by, away,
and cause to move. The findings suggest that language users construct a
spatial relation between the objects in a given time, employ a reference
frame, which may not be encoded in the message, and use the same conceptual
structure consisted of BE-AT for static spatial situations and GO-BE-AT for
static dynamic situations.
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