Long description:

This volume provides an overview of the state of the art of research into the representation of space in language. Perspectives covered include semantic typology, language description, sociocultural research, child language, computational linguistics, formal semantics, and cognitive metaphor research. The collection of chapters is composed to maximize simultaneously the diversity of approaches, methods, and fields of study and the range of phenomena covered. The contributors are leading authorities in the particular line of inquiry and the particular topic they represent in their chapter. The chapters blend a survey article format with summaries of the authors' original research. Another goal is to present a forward-looking perspective on the research covered. The contributors identify major ongoing methodological, theoretical, and empirical innovations and the "big" questions and challenges they see emerging just over the horizon. The contributions were written to remain relevant well into the future, while the face of the language sciences is changing at a breathtaking pace.