Spatial terms reflect near-optimal spatial categories

Abstract

Spatial terms in the world's languages appear to reflect both universal conceptual tendencies and linguistic convention.A similarly mixed picture in the case of color naming has been accounted for in terms of near-optimal partitions of color space.Here, we demonstrate that this account generalizes to spatial terms.We show that the spatial terms of 9 diverse languages near-optimally partition a similarity space of spatial meanings, just as color terms near-optimally partition color space.This account accommodates both universal tendencies and cross-language differences in spatial category extension, and identifies general structuring principles that appear to operate across different semantic domains.

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