Space in Lanugage

In the Kantian tradition space is a universal cognitive primitive, an “a priori form of intuition”,thatconditionsallofourexperience.Itisthenofparticularinterest tostudy thelinguisticexpressionofspace,since languagesseemtocaptureand tomakeexplicit theconstraintsofexperienceontheconstructionofspatialreference.Atthesametime, language confers to spatial representations some referential “detachability”, that distinguishes these representations from those produced by our perceptual experience of space. This fundamental property allows speakers to dissociate and to choose among differentcomponentsofspatial referenceandtoexpress other(temporal,causal, argumentative) meanings.