The case of pidgin and creole languages - Linguistics

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(like Spanish) have a single word en that covers relations that in English would use on or
in, while others have finer distinctions than English. Dutch, for one, has two different
types of on and two types of in.
But the similarities end there. Spatial terms are otherwise quite different from color
terms. There have been attempts to create an implicational hierarchy for spatial terms
(for a thorough review of these, see Levinson et al 2003). The implicit argument is that
some spatial terms are more basic than others, and there is a set order of evolution for
these terms. By this reasoning, in order to have a word for X (e.g., on), a language must
also have a word for Y (e.g., at), even if there is nothing in the meaning of either word
requiring this.
These larger scale efforts to categorize the semantics of spatial expressions have largely
failed. The most expansive attempt thus far is a project conducted by Steve Levinson and
his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute. They are collecting spatial terms from a large
sample of languages. The group has made several attempts to extract some regularity
from the situations that individual prepositions describe. They hypothesize that with the
right analysis, a pattern indicating the most basic use of in or under would emerge.
However, no clear patterns have been found. It is still possible that there is regularity to
assignment of spatial terms, and the problem is that situations are categorized for this
purpose using a scheme that we have not yet uncovered. However, this implies that this
categorization is neither intuitive nor salient, a result that would be troublesome to many
linguists. Conservatively, then, this result indicates that spatial terms are assigned in an