For Ray: A Timeline of Influences and More Updates on ‘What’ and ‘Where’, Barbara Landau (Johns Hopkins University)
My long-term interest in spatial language, its constraints and complexity, has been grounded in decades-long discussions with Ray. Recently, I’ve been rethinking our first proposal to understand spatial prepositions and their foundation in non-linguistic cognition (‘What’ and ‘Where’ BBS, 1993). The theoretical foundations (writ large) endure: Spatial language is highly selective, highly abstract, and does not map simply from or to our non-linguistic spatial representations. This clearly calls out for complex mappings between the two systems, something advocated by Ray in his view for all levels of language. Consistent with this view, I’ll outline some of my recent thinking about spatial prepositions and their acquisition, emphasizing two additions to our original formulation: First, I’ll outline a major division within the class of place prepositions (geometric, force-dynamic), each rooted in a separate system of ‘core cognition’, available early in development. Second, I’ll point to the important role of combinatorics (especially with verbs and their own syntactic requirements) in children’s and adults’ knowledge of force-dynamic terms. I hope these advances continue to build on Ray’s view of semantics as requiring complex mappings with cognitive systems on one side, and syntax on the other side. Let’s see what he thinks.