The impact of social, cultural and geographic factors on spatial relations
Résumé
Communicating about spatial relations is a day-to-day task throughout
our life. We accomplish it so spontaneously and easily that it was thought for long
that our own way of transmitting spatial information was universal. However,
when anthropologists and linguists started to carry on detailed studies on ‘exotic’
cultures, they found that the verbal expression of even basic spatial relations may
differ significantly from language to language. This article contributes to this line
of research and focuses on the local factors, notably cultural and geographic,
which interfere with the linguistic expression and the precise transmission of
spatial information in a few Arabic and Dravidian languages.
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