Cognitive linguistics brought about changes starting from reshaping our approach to metaphors. Our bodily experience in space serves as the basis for the majority of metaphorical expressions and the present article focuses on some of the English, Romanian and Hungarian prepositions/verbal prefixes, such as over, peste, túl, végig. Their basic meaning(s) can be more easily understood resorting t...

As adult native speakers of English, our intuitions about the use of spatial prepositions are quick and sure. However, these intuitions involve attention to a variety of geometric and extra-geometric aspects of the scenes we are describing (Coventry & Garrod, 2004; Feist & Gentner, 2003; Herskovits, 1986; Vandeloise, 2003). Although the role of geometric and extra-geometric factors in the meani...

One important function of language is to name relations. Preschool children performed a simple mapping task with and without hearing spatial prepositions calling attention to key relations. Children at 44 months were successful only if they were in the language condition. By 49 months, children were competent on the task regardless of condition, although there were still benefits of language. T...

We present the results of several machine learning tasks that exploit explicit spatial language to classify rhetorical relations and the spatial information of narrative events. Three corpora are annotated with figure and ground (granularity) relationships, mereotopologically classified verbs and prepositions, and frames of reference. For rhetorical relations, Naı̈ve Bayesian models achieve 84.9...

this paper is an attempt to explore the prepositions used to encode the agent in persian passive constructions. according to givón (1983) the main function of the passive constructions is to defocus the agent. as the general trend in persian is to omit this defocused agent, we will stylistically divide the passive constructions into two main sub branches, namely unmarked and marked passives acc...

We describe an inventory of semantic relations that are expressed by prepositions. We define these relations by building on the word sense disambiguation task for prepositions and propose a mapping from preposition senses to the relation labels by collapsing semantically related senses across prepositions.

Machine translation of locative prepositions is not straightforward, even between closely related languages. This paper discusses a system of translation of locative prepositions between English and French. The system is based on the premises that English and French do not always conceptualize objects in the same way, and that this accounts for the major differences in the ways that locative pr...

The paper presents a computational model for a context-dependent analysis of a physical environment in terms of spatial proximity. The model provides a basis for grounding linguistic analyses of spatial expressions in visual perception. The model uses potential fields to model spatial proximity. It has been implemented, and when combined with a handcrafted grammar, is used to enable a conversat...