JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language.Most approaches to spatial language have assumed that the simplest spatial notions are (after Piaget) topological and universal (containment, contiguity, proximity, support, represented as semantic primitives such as IN, ON, UNDER, etc.). These concepts would be coded directly in language, above all in small closed classes such as adpositions--thus providing a striking example of semantic categories as language-specific projections of universal conceptual notions. This idea, if correct, should have as a consequence that the semantic categories instantiated in spatial adpositions should be essentially uniform crosslinguistically. This article attempts to verify this possibility by comparing the semantics of spatial adpositions in nine unrelated languages, with the help of a standard elicitation procedure, thus producing a preliminary semantic typology of spatial adpositional systems. The differences between the languages turn out to be so significant as to be incompatible with stronger versions of the UNIVERSAL CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES hypothesis. Rather, the language-specific spatial adposition meanings seem to emerge as compact subsets of an underlying semantic space, with certain areas being statistical ATTRACTORS or FOCI. Moreover, a comparison of systems with different degrees of complexity suggests the possibility of positing implicational hierarchies for spatial adpositions. But such hierarchies need to be treated as successive divisions of semantic space, as in recent treatments of basic color terms. This type of analysis appears to be a promising approach for future work in semantic typology.*

This paper presents an internal classification of Tupí-Guaraní based on a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of lexical data from 30 Tupí-Guaraní languages and 2 non-Tupí-Guaraní Tupian languages, Awetí and Mawé. A Bayesian phylogenetic analysis using a generalized binary cognate gain and loss model was carried out on a character table based on the binary coding of cognate sets, which were formed with attention to semantic shift. The classification shows greater internal structure than previous ones, but is congruent with them in several ways. RESUMEN:Este artículo presenta una clasificación interna de la familia Tupí-Guaraní en base a datos léxicos de 30 lenguas tupí-guaraníes y 2 lenguas no tupí-guaraníes, awetí y mawé. Un análisis filogenético que utiliza el modelo Bayesiano de ganancia y pérdida de cognado binario generalizado se llevó a cabo en una tabla de carácteres basado en la codificación binaria de los cognados afines, que se formaron con atención al cambio semántico. La clasificación muestra una estructura interna mayor que las anteriores, pero que resulta congruente con ellas de varias maneras. PALABRAS CLAVE: Lenguas amazónicas; Tupí-Guaraní; Filogenética; Clasificación de lenguas.* Affiliations for the authors of this paper are: Chousou-Polydouri-Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage, cnrs, Donnelly, Michael, OʼHagan-university of caLifornia, berkeLey; Meira-Museu Paraense emíLio goeLDi; Bartolomei, Wauters-inDePenDent schoLar.

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