Stephen C. Levinson, Space in language and cognition:
Explorations in cognitive diversity. Series in Language, Culture and
Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii, 389. Pb
$27.99.
This is an important book that makes basic arguments of real
consequence for current understanding of the relation among language,
gesture, and mind. Convincing new experimental and field data from a wide
range of languages are used to argue that human spatial cognition is
organized into a limited set of types, that cross-linguistic variation in
spatial categorization is far more extensive than previously known, and
that language structure has a profound, if mediated, influence on thought,
gesture, and other modalities of nonlinguistic cognition. Levinson
carefully separates linguistic from cognitive analyses in order to trace
the relations between them. His book is also an exercise in comparative
linguistics, and a strong proposal for a typology of linguistic systems of
spatial representation. The scope and strength of the arguments ensure the
significance of the book and the debates it has already begun to provoke
(see Gallistel 2002, Levinson
et al. 2002, Li & Gleitman 2002,
Majid 2002).