This series of HANDBOOKS OF LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION SCIENCE is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction. For "classic" linguistics there appears to be a need for a review of the state of the art which will provide a reference base for the rapid advances in research undertaken from a variety of theoretical standpoints, while in the more recent branches of communication science the handbooks will give researchers both an verview and orientation. To attain these objectives, the series will aim for a standard comparable to that of the leading handbooks in other disciplines, and to this end will strive for comprehensiveness, theoretical explicitness, reliable documentation of data and findings, and up-to-date methodology. The editors, both of the series and of the individual volumes, and the individual contributors, are committed to this aim. The languages of publication are English, German, and French. The main aim of the series is to provide an appropriate account of the state of the art in the various areas of linguistics and communication science covered by each of the various handbooks; however no inflexible pre-set limits will be imposed on the scope of each volume. The series is open-ended, and can thus take account of further developments in the field. This conception, coupled with the necessity of allowing adequate time for each volume to be prepared with the necessary care, means that there is no set time-table for the publication of the whole series. Each volume will be a self-contained work, complete in itself. The order in which the handbooks are published does not imply any rank ordering, but is determined by the way in which the series is organized; the editor of the whole series enlist a competent editor for each individual volume. Once the principal editor for a volume has been found, he or she then has a completely free hand in the choice of co-editors and contributors. The editors plan each volume independently of the others, being governed only by general formal principles. The series editor only intervene where questions of delineation between individual volumes are concerned. It is felt that this (modus operandi) is best suited to achieving the objectives of the series, namely to give a competent account of the present state of knowledge and of the perception of the problems in the area covered by each volume.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of spatial configurations of language use and of language use in space. It consists of four parts. The first part covers the various practices of describing space through language, including spatial references in spoken interaction or in written texts, the description of motion events as well as the creation of imaginative spaces in storytelling. The second part surveys aspects of the spatial organization of face-to-face communication including not only spatial arrangements of small groups in interaction but also the spatial dimension of sign language and gestures. The third part is devoted to the communicative resources of constructed spaces and the ways in which these facilitate and shape communication. Part four, finally, is devoted to pragmatics across space and cultures, i.e. the ways in which language use differs across language varieties, languages and cultures.

This book presents recent research on the role of space as a mechanism in language use and learning. It proceeds from the notion that cognition in real time, developmental time, and over evolutionary time occurs in space, and that the physical properties of space may provide insights into basic cognitive processes, including memory, attention, action, and perception. It looks at how physical space and landmarks are used in cognitive representations and serve as the basis of human cognition in a range of core mechanisms to index memories and ground meanings that are not themselves explicitly about space. The editors have brought together experimental psychologists, computer scientists, robotocists, linguists, and researchers in child language in order to consider the nature and applications of this research and in particular its implications for understanding the processes involved in language acquisition.

This is an interdisciplinary volume that focuses on the central topic of the representation of events, namely cross-cultural differences in representing time and space, as well as various aspects of the conceptualisation of space and time. It brings together research on space and time from a variety of angles, both theoretical and methodological. Crossing boundaries between and among disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, philosophy, or anthropology forms a creative platform in a bold attempt to reveal the complex interaction of language, culture, and cognition in the context of human communication and interaction. The authors address the nature of spatial and temporal constructs from a number of perspectives, such as cultural specificity in determining time intervals in an Amazonian culture, distinct temporalities in a specific Mongolian hunter community, Russian-specific conceptualisation of temporal relations, Seri and Yucatec frames of spatial reference, memory of events in space and time, and metaphorical meaning stemming from perception and spatial artefacts, to name but a few themes. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different albeit related point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Linguistic diversity (HCP 36) which focuses on the language-specific vis-à-vis universal aspects of linguistic representation of spatial and temporal reference.

Does temporal language depend on spatial language? Many parallels between spatial and temporal expressions, and many examples of metaphorical processes, seem to prove this. But how are expressions such as before and after, in front and behind actually used in natural discourse - does their application reflect a conceptual dependency relation? The book addresses this question from an innovative perspective, drawing together earlier findings from various directions and supplementing them by empirical investigations. Gradually a new picture emerges: The concepts of space and time are represented in language usage in various systematic ways, reflecting how we understand the world - and at the same time reflecting how our concepts of space and time differ fundamentally.

This volume offers novel insights into linguistic diversity in the domains of spatial and temporal reference, searching for uniformity amongst diversity. A number of authors discuss expression of dynamic spatial relations cross-linguistically in a vast range of typologically different languages such as Bezhta, French, Hinuq, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Serbian, and Spanish, among others. The contributions on linguistic expression of time all shed new light on pertinent questions regarding this cognitive domain, such as the hotly debated relationship between cross-linguistic differences in talking about time and universal principles of utterance interpretation, modelling temporal inference through aspectual interactions, as well as the complexity of the acquisition of tense-aspect relations in a second language. The topic of space and time in language and culture is also represented, from a different point of view, in the sister volume Space and Time in Languages and Cultures: Language, Culture, and Cognition (HCP 37) which discusses spatial and temporal constructs in human language, cognition, and culture in order to come closer to a better understanding of the interaction between shared and individual characteristics of language and culture that shape the way people interact with each other and exchange information about the spatio-temporal constructs that underlie their cognitive, social, and linguistic foundations.

This Element examines the function and significance of typographic space. It considers in turn the space within letters, the space between letters, the space between lines, and the margin space surrounding the text-block, to develop the hypothesis that viewed collectively these constitute as a 'metalanguage' complementary to the text. Drawing upon critical perspectives from printing, typeface design, typography, avant-garde artistic practice and design history, the Element examines the connotative values and philosophies embodied in the form and disposition of space. These include the values attributed to symmetry and asymmetry, the role of 'active' space in the development of modernist typography, the debated relationship between type and writing, the divergent ideologies of the printing industry and the letter arts, and the impact of successive technologies upon both the organisation and the perception of typographic space.

This volume provides general linguists with new data and analysis on languages spoken in China regarding various aspects of space and quantification, using different approaches. Contributions by researchers from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Europe, the United States and Australia offer insights on aspects of language ranging from phonology and morphology to syntax and semantics, while the approaches vary from formal, historical, areal, typological, and cognitive linguistics to second language acquisition. After separate volumes on space and quantification in languages of China, the studies in this volume combine space and quantification to allow readers a view of the intersection of the two topics. Each article contributes to general linguistic knowledge while discussing a particular aspect of space or quantification in a particular language/dialect, offering new data and analysis from languages that are spoken in the same geographical area, and that belong to various language families that exist and evolve in close contact with one another.