animacy and spatial terms

[George Lakoff]

There's a huge literature on spatial terms in cognitive linguistics. What
kinds of examples were you thinking of?

George

>Greetings,
>
>I'm a graduate student at Northwestern University working on the semantics
>of spatial prepositions.  I've started to investigate the kinds of factors
>about a scene that influence the use of these terms, and I've become
>interested in the effect of animacy.
>
>My question for the list:  Have you (or anyone you know of) investigated
>the effect of either the animacy of the object located (Talmy's Figure) or
>or the animacy of the reference object (Talmy's Ground) on the use of
>spatial relational terms?
>
>Thanks in advance for any help,
>
>Michele
>
>Michele Feist
>Department of Linguistics
>Northwestern University
>2016 Sheridan Road
>Evanston, IL 60208
>
>m-feist at nwu.edu