Space project (36 entries)
The Space project investigates how people talk about and understand space in large-scale space for navigation and small-scale space for locating objects, and how space structures our understanding of other domains, such as time.
(10 entries)
Picture Series for Positional Verbs: Eliciting the Verbal Component in Locative Descriptions
How do different languages encode location and position meanings? In conjunction with the BowPed picture series and Caused Positions task, this elicitation tool is designed to help researchers (i) identify… More →
“Locally-Anchored Spatial Gestures”: Historical Description of the Local Environment As a Gesture Elicitation Task
Gesture is an integral part of face-to-face communication, and provides a rich area for cross-cultural comparison. “Locally-anchored spatial gestures” are gestures that are roughly oriented to the actual geographical direction… More →
Eliciting Contrastive Use of Demonstratives for Objects Within Close Personal Space
Contrastive reference, where a speaker presents or identifies one item in explicit contrast to another (I like this book but that one is boring), has special communicative and information structure… More →
General Questions About Topological Relations in Adpositions and Cases
The world’s languages encode a diverse range of topological relations. However, cross-linguistic investigation suggests that the relations IN, AT and ON are especially fundamental to the grammaticised expression of space.… More →
Topological Relations (BowPed)
This task is designed to elicit expressions of spatial relations. It was originally designed by Melissa Bowerman for use with young children, but was then developed further by Bowerman in… More →
Hypotheses Concerning Basic Locative Constructions and the Verbal Elements Within Them
Languages differ widely in terms of how they encode the fundamental concepts of location and position. For some languages, verbs have an important role to play in describing situations (e.g.,… More →
Route Descriptions: Interactive Games with Eric’s Maze Task
What are the preferred ways to describe spatial relationships in different linguistic and cultural groups, and how does this interact with non-linguistic spatial awareness? This game was devised as an… More →
Enter/Exit Animation for Linguistic Elicitation
This task investigates the expression of “enter” and “exit” events, and is a supplement to the Motion Elicitation task. Consultants are asked to describe a series of animated clips where… More →
Bloxes: An Interactive Task for the Elicitation of Dimensional Expressions
“Dimensional expressions” single out and describe one symmetric axis of a 1D, 2D, or 3D object (e.g., The road is long). “Bloxes” is an interactive, object-matching task that elicits descriptions… More →
Background Questions for the “Enter”/”Exit” Research
How do languages encode different kinds of movement, and what features do people pay attention to when describing motion events? This document outlines topics concerning the investigation of “enter” and… More →