JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact

This project collected linguistic data for spatial relations across a typologically and genetically varied set of languages. In the linguistic analysis, we focus on the ways in which propositions may be functionally equivalent across the linguistic communities while nonetheless representing semantically quite distinctive frames of reference. Running nonlinguistic experiments on subjects from these language communities, we find that a population's cognitive frame of reference correlates with the linguistic frame of reference within the same referential domain.* * This article developed from a presentation entitled 'Cultural variation in spatial conceptualization' at

The three Frames of Reference recognized in the current inventory of spatiallanguage types are differentiated by their placement of the Anchor from which the vector of search space from Ground to Figure is calculated (Levinson 1996). In certain well-recognized examples, Anchor merges with Ground. The existing analysis treats this merged component as analytically Ground rather than Anchor; its location in or out of the speech situation is therefore taken to be independent of the Frame of Reference typology. Instead, I treat this component as analytically Anchor, making its speech-situation status criterial to the typology. Four, not three, Frames of Reference now appear. The fourth, "Direct" frame, distinguishes binary locutions with a speech participant as Ground/Anchor (e.g. 'in front of you') from "Object-Centered" binary locutions in which Ground/ Anchor is not a speech participant ( e.g. 'in front of the kettle'). This four-frame analysis corresponds better than does the three-frame one to the logic of rotation sensitivity which has been used to show Whorfian parallels between language and conceptualization across cultures. I close by discussing the application of Frame of Reference typology to pointing gestures, and show how recognition of the fourth frame of reference allows us to bring discussion of these, and of the linguistic demonstratives and locatives with which they so frequently co-occur, fully within the Frame of Reference typology.

A part/whole judgment task was administered to adults in ten different language communities around the world. Participants were instructed to treat two-dimensional abstract line figures differently from the left/right mirror-image reflections of the same figures. The data support the proposal that sensitivity to this kind of mirror-image contrast is acquired: Literate individuals generally were better able to operate in terms of this distinction than were non-literate participants in the study. Contrary to this general pattern, however, Tamil literates as well as non-literates often treated the left/right mirror-image reflections as non-reflected figures, despite the training to treat them differently. The difference between the Tamil literates and the literate individuals in the other language communities sampled may reflect the fact that mirror-image contrasts are used to different degrees in their respective scripts.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract