{"id":1251,"date":"2010-12-06T22:00:15","date_gmt":"2010-12-06T20:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1251"},"modified":"2010-11-23T12:50:29","modified_gmt":"2010-11-23T10:50:29","slug":"1251","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1251","title":{"rendered":"Spatial language and dialogue"},"content":{"rendered":"
Spatial language and dialogue<\/strong>. Ed. by Kenny R. Coventry<\/strong>, Thora Tenbrink<\/strong>, and John A. Bateman<\/strong>. (Explorations in language and space 3.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. x, 216. ISBN 9780199554201<\/a>. $135 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Engin Arik<\/strong><\/a>, Purdue University<\/em><\/p>\n

The use of spatial language in dialogues is one of the research areas that will contribute to our knowledge of the language of space. This book does so wonderfully by providing thirteen papers on psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, and computer science in spatial language in dialogic contexts.<\/p>\n

Kenny R. Coventry, Thora Tenbrink, and John Bateman, in Ch. 1 \u2018Spatial language and dialogue: Navigating the domain\u2019 (1\u20137), outline the book and give motivations for studies on the language of space in dialogues. In Ch. 2, \u2018Why dialogue methods are important for investigating spatial language\u2019 (8\u201322), Matthew E. Watson<\/strong>, Martin J. Pickering<\/strong>, and Holly P. Branigan<\/strong> stress the importance of studying spatial language in dialogue and show that interlocutors affect each other in talking about space. In Ch. 3\u2018Spatial dialogue between partners with mismatched abilities\u2019 (23\u201339), Michael F. Schober<\/strong> shows that interlocutors\u2019 individual spatial abilities can affect spatial descriptions in dialogues.<\/p>\n

Constanze Vorwerg<\/strong>, in Ch 4 \u2018Consistency in successive spatial utterances\u2019 (40\u201355), looks at speakers\u2019 descriptions of various scenes and proposes that speakers tend to use similar strategies such as consistent reference frame, lexical items, and syntactic constructions. In Ch. 5 \u2018An interactionally situated analysis of what prompts shift in the motion verbs come<\/em> and go<\/em> in a map task\u2019 (56\u201369), Anna Filipi <\/strong>and Roger Wales<\/strong> use \u00a0conversation analysis to investigate map descriptions of pairs of adults and pairs of children, focusing on the verbs come <\/em>and go<\/em>. The results indicate that most speakers use the verb go<\/em>, even though this use shifts their perspectives.<\/p>\n

Luc Steels<\/strong> and Martin Loetzsch<\/strong>, in Ch. 6 \u2018Perspective alignment in spatial language\u2019 (70\u201388), provide results from a series of experiments with paired robots in order to investigate perspective-taking in spatial language. They show that robots, too, need to learn each other\u2019s perspective to establish successful communication. In Ch. 7 \u2018Formulating spatial descriptions across various dialogue contexts\u2019 (89\u2013103), Laura A. Carlson<\/strong> and Patrick L. Hill<\/strong> show that speakers construct spatial relations with a preference for a reference object in a salient relation. In Ch. 8 \u2018Identifying objects in English and German: A contrastive linguistic analysis of spatial reference\u2019 (104\u201318), Thora Tenbrink<\/strong> examines how English and German speakers differ in their written spatial descriptions from a web-based study. In Ch. 9 \u2018Explanations in gesture, diagram, and word\u2019 (119\u201331), Barbara Tversky<\/strong>, Julie Heiser<\/strong>, Paul Lee<\/strong>, and Marie-Paule Daniel<\/strong> present work on interlocutors\u2019 gestural, verbal, and diagrammatic descriptions of navigation and instructions to assemble objects in the stimuli.<\/p>\n

Timo Sowa<\/strong> and Ipke Wachsmuth<\/strong>, in Ch. 10 \u2018A computational model for the representation and processing of shape in coverbal iconic gestures\u2019 (132\u201346), provide a formal representation that takes speech and gesture into account in object-shape descriptions. In Ch. 11 \u2018Knowledge representation for generating locating gestures in route directions\u2019 (147\u201365), Kristina Striegnitz<\/strong>, Paul Tepper<\/strong>, Andrew Lovett<\/strong>, and Justine Cassell<\/strong> investigate how an embodied conversational agent on a computer can generate human-like gestures when giving directions. In Ch. 12 \u2018Grounding information in route explanation dialogues\u2019 (166\u201376), Philippe Muller<\/strong> and Laurent Pr\u00e9vot<\/strong> analyze feedback strategies of French speakers giving route descriptions on the phone. Finally, in Ch. 13 \u2018Telling Roland where to go: HRI dialogues on route navigation\u2019 (177\u201390), Shi Hui<\/strong> and Thora Tenbrink address potential problems in human-robotic wheelchair dialogues during route instructions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spatial language and dialogue. Ed. by Kenny R. Coventry, Thora Tenbrink, and John A. Bateman. (Explorations in language and space 3.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. x, 216. ISBN 9780199554201. $135 (Hb). Reviewed by Engin Arik, Purdue University The use of spatial language in dialogues is one of the research areas that will contribute […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1251"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1253,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1251\/revisions\/1253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}