From Latin to Romance: The coding of spatial relations with human landmarks

Luraghi, Silvia

doi:10.1075/tsl.99.08lur

In:Case, Animacy and Semantic Roles
Edited by Seppo Kittilä, Katja Västi and Jussi Ylikoski
[Typological Studies in Language 99] 2011
► pp. 209–234

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The coding of spatial relations with human landmarks

From Latin to Romance

Silvia Luraghi | University of Pavia

Published online: 28 September 2011

https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.99.08lur

The paper discusses the coding of location and direction with respect to human entities, and analyzes the change undergone by the Latin coding system with its outcomes in the Romance languages. Latin features different coding strategies depending on whether location and direction relate to the interior of a landmark or to its vicinity; the former were used with inanimate landmarks, while the latter could be used with both inanimate and animate (human) ones. Most Romance languages do not continue this opposition. As a consequence, coding strategies for space expressions with human landmarks across the Romance languages display different patterns, which are described and discussed in the paper.

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