Landau Barbara
Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University.
Cogn Sci. 2017 Mar;41 Suppl 2:321-350. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12410. Epub 2016 Sep 16.
In this article, I revisit Landau and Jackendoff's () paper, "What and where in spatial language and spatial cognition," proposing a friendly amendment and reformulation. The original paper emphasized the distinct geometries that are engaged when objects are represented as members of object kinds (named by count nouns), versus when they are represented as figure and ground in spatial expressions (i.e., play the role of arguments of spatial prepositions). We provided empirical and theoretical arguments for the link between these distinct representations in spatial language and their accompanying nonlinguistic neural representations, emphasizing the "what" and "where" systems of the visual system. In the present paper, I propose a second division of labor between two classes of spatial prepositions in English that appear to be quite distinct. One class includes prepositions such as in and on, whose core meanings engage force-dynamic, functional relationships between objects, with geometry only a marginal player. The second class includes prepositions such as above/below and right/left, whose core meanings engage geometry, with force-dynamic relationships a passing or irrelevant variable. The insight that objects' force-dynamic relationships matter to spatial terms' uses is not new; but thinking of these terms as a distinct set within spatial language has theoretical and empirical consequences that are new. I propose three such consequences, rooted in the fact that geometric knowledge is highly constrained and early-emerging in life, while force-dynamic knowledge of objects and their interactions is relatively unconstrained and needs to be learned piecemeal over a lengthy timeline. First, the two classes will engage different learning problems, with different developmental trajectories for both first and second language learners; second, the classes will naturally lead to different degrees of cross-linguistic variation; and third, they may be rooted in different neural representations.
在本文中，我重新审视了兰道和杰肯多夫（）的论文《空间语言与空间认知中的“什么”与“哪里”》，并提出了一个友好的修正和重新阐述。原文强调了在将物体表示为物体类别成员（由可数名词命名）时，与将它们表示为空间表达式中的图形和背景（即充当空间介词的论元角色）时所涉及的不同几何结构。我们为空间语言中这些不同表示与其伴随的非语言神经表示之间的联系提供了实证和理论依据，强调了视觉系统的“什么”和“哪里”系统。在本文中，我提出了英语中两类空间介词之间的第二种分工，这两类介词似乎截然不同。一类包括诸如in和on之类的介词，其核心意义涉及物体之间的力动态、功能关系，几何结构只是一个次要因素。第二类包括诸如above/below和right/left之类的介词，其核心意义涉及几何结构，力动态关系只是一个次要或不相关的变量。物体的力动态关系对空间术语的使用很重要这一观点并不新鲜；但将这些术语视为空间语言中的一个独特集合会产生新的理论和实证结果。我提出了三个这样的结果，其根源在于几何知识在生活中受到高度限制且出现较早，而物体及其相互作用的力动态知识则相对不受限制，需要在很长的时间线上逐步学习。第一，这两类介词会涉及不同的学习问题，对于第一语言和第二语言学习者来说都有不同的发展轨迹；第二，这两类介词自然会导致不同程度的跨语言变异；第三，它们可能植根于不同的神经表示。
