A téri viszonyok kódolása a magyarban és az olaszban. Kontrasztív tipológiai elemzés

This crosslinguistic survey of spatial reference in language use is about the way Hungarian and Italian languages structure the spatial domain. The purpose of the paper is twofold, one theoretical and the other practical. Linguistic typology has undergone serious crises lately as it has been proven that very few, if any, language universals exist, due to the extreme structural diversity of languages. We have to pursue then new ways of investigation taking into account an interdisciplinary approach. Language typology may complement and learn from linguistics of other persuasions which in turn may enhance theoretical well groundedness of language typology and broaden its research scope. I argue that opening toward cognitive linguistics, which has experienced a shift towards more empirically-based inquiry recently, may provide a potential for methodological cross-fertilization. From the perspective of applied linguistics the aim of this study is to approach the question of how and to what extent semantic typology, a new kind of work in linguistics which starts out from a functional base (essentially, how one answers ˮwhereˮ-questions), can be applied to teaching Hungarian and Italian as a second language.