Prepositions combine with nouns flexibly when describing concrete locative relations (e.g. at/on/in the school) but are rigidly prescribed when paired with abstract concepts (e.g. at risk; on Wednesday; in trouble). In the former case they do linguistic work based on their discrete semantic qualities, and in the latter they appear to serve a primarily grammatical function. We used the abstract ...

Spatial and temporal Measure Phrases (MPs) such as ten meters, five years etc. appear with various linguistic items, including locative prepositions, scalar dimensional adjectives and comparatives, and show certain systematic contrasts in these domains. Some examples are given below. (1) a. Prepositions: ten meters behind/outside/*near/*on the house b. Adjectives: ten meters wide/*narrow/deep/*...

The ways in which different languages encode motion events has been the topic of intense analysis and dissection in recent years, especially with regard to Talmy’s (1991, 2000) verb/satellite-framed typology. This chapter shifts course by moving away from motion event typologies and the encoding of canonical motion events. Instead, it shows that English speakers can conceptualise space in terms...

As far as I know, the semantics of such modified numerals has so far only been discussed in Corver and Zwarts (2006), who focus on the close relation between the locative spatial semantics of prepositions like under and their use in numeral quantifiers. In this paper, I will turn to directional prepositions and investigate the role of directionality in numeral modification. I will zoom in on th...

The spatial prepositions ”in front of” or ”behind” can be used in different frames of reference; some determinants of their deictic and intrinsic uses are discussed. A series of experiments shows that both the intrinsic orientation of the reference object and the social characteristics of the situation significantly affect the production of utterances containing ”in front of” or ”behind”, or re...

People often use spontaneous gestures when communicating spatial information. We investigated focal brain-injured individuals to test the hypotheses that (1) naming motion event components of manner-path (represented by verbs-prepositions in English) are impaired selectively, (2) gestures compensate for impaired naming. Patients with left or right hemisphere damage (LHD or RHD) and elderly cont...

This paper presents a lexical account of the syntax of Sorani Kurdish prepositions within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Kurdish dialects have a rich class of prepositions and prepositional collocations with a complex syntactic behavior (Edmonds 1955, Mackenzie 1961). This situation results from severla factors. The first one involves the constitution of this clas...

What aspects of spatial relations influence speakers' choice of locative? This article presents a study of static spatial descriptions from 24 languages. The study reveals two kinds of spatial terms evident cross-linguistically: specific spatial terms and general spatial terms (GSTs). Whereas specific spatial terms-including English prepositions-occur in a limited range of situations, with conc...