Commentary on the Papers by Klein and Talmy

Abstract

Leonard Talmy’s paper, presented as a study of “the semantics of grammar,” concerns itself with discovering and analyzing those categories and devices found in the grammatical skeletons of the sentences in a language which are dedicated to the conceptualization and formulation of spatial information. Wolfgang Klein’s study, by contrast, is principally a report on a continuing research program designed to discover empirically the ways in which both lexical and grammatical material can be used in communication involving the description of “spatial worlds,” and how speakers present and “linearize” information about paths in such “worlds.”