Space in diachrony: An introduction

Space is a fundamental dimension of human life, and is pervasive in human experience. Spatial perception, orientation in space, and spatial cognition in general have a significant impact on language in various ways: especially in the framework of Cognitive Grammar, space is considered a basic cognitive domain, providing the source for the conceptualization of more abstract domains. The linguistic encoding of space, including spatial concepts such as location, direction, path of motion and the like, has been central to virtually all theoretical approaches to semantics, and extensive research on space in language has resulted in numerous publications.