Every day, we navigate our environments with astonishingease. Most of our paths are familiar to us and can benavigated without (much) conscious thought; in other cases,we use various strategies to find our way (Tenbrink &Wiener, 2007). Since these processes are at the heart ofhuman spatial cognition they have been researchedextensively, often based on route directions as the mostcommon verbalizations of navigation. Our research extendsthis tradition across various wayfinding contexts, addressingstreet network scenarios (Hölscher, Tenbrink, & Wiener,2011), complex buildings (Tenbrink, Bergmann, &Konieczny, 2011), alpine environments (Egorova, Tenbrink,& Purves, 2015), and including effects of automatic systemsas producers (Tenbrink & Winter, 2009) or recipients(Moratz & Tenbrink, 2006; Tenbrink et al., 2010) of spatialdirections. In all of these studies natural language data areused to address concepts of navigation, some of which areexpressed explicitly, while others remain implicit and onlyindirectly reflected through the ways in which speakers uselanguage in spatial navigation contexts.

Direction giving involves diverse cognitive processes such as creating a mental map, following the desired route and choosing the correct terminology to provide directions efficiently. Many perceived differences have been speculated in the speech of men and women, yet research on spontaneous direction giving differences based on gender is limited. This small-scale qualitative study uses Cognitive Discourse Analysis to investigate whether men and women differ in the frequency of usage of projective terms, cardinal directions, hedges, modal verbs, landmarks, serial orientation measures and distance indicators in route directions. The patterns emerging consistently through the results show that gender plays an important role in the provision of directions. Key results included a utilization of humor by women when direction giving, as well as a higher usage of landmarks and hedges than men. Key results contradicting previous findings showed no usage of cardinal directions by either gender, as well as the serial orientation marker ‘then’ being utilized more by women rather than men.

This paper explores previous arguments that language evolved not from animal communication, as naturally assumed by most scholars, but instead out of animal cognition. It is proposed here that additional support for this argument comes from Cognitive Linguistics, an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics mediates communication and cognition but, as with Cognitive Discourse Analysis, studies language use in terms of what it demonstrates about underlying cognitive processes and concepts. The paper demonstrates key examples of animal cognition’s links to language, with Cognitive Linguistics support, as well as the approach’s application to animal cognition in terms of domain-general symbolism, beyond verbal language. However, because communication remains a major function of language, the communicative aspect ought to be maintained in the explanation of language evolution.