This book is about the way languages structure the spatial domain. Spatial language is an important topic of current research, because it offers insights into a central area of human cognition. The research in this book shows that, contrary to the prevailing assumptions, there is quite unexpected variation in the conceptual structure of this central domain across languages. Semantic universals do not lie at the complex conceptual level that many linguists and psychologists had supposed, but rather at a more abstract level.

This book is designed as the companion volume to Space in language and cognition (Cambridge University Press, 2003), which is focussed on the psychology of space, and the cognitive consequences of language difference. In contrast, the present volume provides the methods, empirical materials and the wide survey of language variation which are presupposed and form the basis for the study of cognition in the companion book.

This book represents a new kind of work in linguistics, which we are calling ‘semantic typology’. Most work in typology takes some function, and asks how different languages use different formal means to satisfy this function. Instead, in this book, starting out from a functional base (centrally, how one answers ‘Where’-questions), we ask what are the semantic parameters, or semantical notions, used to structure the relevant semantic field. Such semantic parameters are reflected in both major grammatical distinctions and the structure of lexical fields.