My Spatial Linguistic Ramblings

Space -- the final frontier. These are the voyages of my PhD enterprise. My continuing mission to explore new ideas in computational linguistics, to boldly search what no one has searched before.

After many journeys on perilous, stormy seas, I rediscovered an ancient linguistic continent: space. Since then, I have studied how we perceive space, how we think about it and especially how we speak and write about it.

The linguistic realm of space was among the first to surface in the language of the first human speakers (Deutscher), and remains today among the first that are acquired by children. When they become aware of the surrounding world, they first learn to distinguish "here" from "there" and "this" from "that"; then they recognize the physical objects around them and relationships between them, such as "in", "out", "in front of", "under" and "between". Later, they start thinking in similar terms about time, cause, efect, society and the rest of the picture.

In the words of Lakoff and Johnson, spatial concepts are primitives (i.e., we don't need other concepts to understand them) that partly structure most of our concepts by way of spatial metaphors such as "up is good" or "down is bad". The localist linguistic school (Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Gruber, Anderson, Van Voorst, Jackendoff) places the conceptualization of spatial events at the core of our conceptualization of all other events. Herskovitz, Landau, Langacker, Levinson, Talmy and Tversky have granted special attention to the spatial content of language.

Near the spatial continent lies the temporal continent. Our mental universe is anchored in these two continents in the sense that everything we think or do is related to space and time in one way or another. I subscribe to the view that the linguistic continent of time is a one-dimensional offspring of the three-dimensional linguistic continent of space. For example, in English, many expressions related to time (e.g., "before", "after", "long", "short", "between", "interval", "distance") are also related to space in similar ways. Time seems to have borrowed its language from space. The two continents are connected by a land called Motion or, more general, Change. While one can propose purely spatial concepts like locations, as well as purely temporal concepts like minutes, most of our concepts are related to both space and time and thus are grounded in the land of Motion or Change.

Other Spatial Perspectives

Many scientific and cognitive domains approach space from their own directions:

• chemistry and bioinformatics search patterns in spatial configurations of atoms and molecules;
• geographical information systems handle geo-political entities laid out on a map, defining spatial relations such as inclusion and adjacency;
• spatio-temporal databases encode, naturally, entities with spatio-temporal attributes;
• spatial statistics looks for terrain patterns in data obtained from satellite maps;
• computer vision recognizes images and spatial configurations of objects represented in them;
• robotics also recognizes spatial configurations since robots must move around; also, we would like them to follow route directions given in natural language;
• knowledge representation proposes ontologies and other encodings that facilitate qualitative and other types of reasoning with spatial information;
• spatial cognition studies how we come to perceive space and how we operate with it.

Their common focus on space connects these domains to each other, so they exchange methods and representations. For example, graph matching is used both in computer vision and textual entailment.

Each of the above domains has its own literature which refers in particular ways to space. For instance, chemistry and biology may talk about spatial relations between atoms or molecules, while geographical information systems talk about spatial relations in a country or a city. Relativistic physics and astronomy talk about galaxies, star systems, matter and gravitation which bend space. The challenge for the computational linguist is to devise models and systems which are able to "understand" all these spatial perspectives.

Finally, regular conferences on Spatial Cognition and Spatial Information Theory bring together different domains and approaches under the common spatial umbrella.