Segmenting the space of the human body

Majid, Asifa

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Talk

Segmenting the space of the human body

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons119

Majid, Asifa
Language and Cognition Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

There are no public fulltexts stored in PuRe

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Majid, A. (2007). Segmenting the space of the human body. Talk presented at the 3rd ICCLS Symposium on Spatial cognition and its expression in language and gesture. Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany. 2007-07-02.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-000F-0944-C

Abstract

The body is widely regarded as a template for spatial cognition and spatial language. However, recent cross-cultural work suggests that the conception of the body – as reflected in language – is not universal. The basic segments and categories that are recognized across languages vary substantially, with a third of the world’s languages not lexically distinguishing between “hand” and “arm”, for example. It appears that there are a not a universal set of “body parts” that get encoded in language, raising the question – what is the precise relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic categories of the body.