Language and Space Marcus Kracht Department of Linguistics, UCLA 3125 Campbell Hall PO Box 951543 Los Angeles, CA 90095–1543
[email protected] March 15, 2007 2 Introduction Foreword My own interest in space and language was sparked off by the regularities I ob- served in the case systems of Finnish and Hungarian. Though the facts are often obvious and have been pointed out many times in the literature, I was surprised to find that most literature is concerned only with the morphological aspects of space, and that there seemed to be very little on semantics. The more I looked into the matter the more I discovered how fascinating the area is; I also learned that there is a lot of material on space and language, but it tends to be somewhat lesser known. There is a noticeable trend to take the linguistics of space more serious also from a theoretical point of view. The present book does not attempt to provide a typological survey, nor is it uniquely theoretical in character. I have tried to create a synthesis between lin- guistically oriented investigation (involving syntax, morphology and historical de- velopment) and formal ones (which include the mathematical structure of space and other spatial concepts). Inevitably, some parts of the book will be hard going for a linguist and they might therefore disapprove of my overly formal stance. Yet, I hope that such readers will benefit nevertheless from this work even if they skip such sections. On the other hand, when formal accounts of meanings can be given I think they should be given.