What factors influence people’s use of spatial prepositions? In this paper, we examine the influence of four factors – geometry of the Ground, function of the Ground, animacy of the Ground, and animacy of the Figure – on the use of English in and on. We find evidence for all four of these factors. We conclude that spatial prepositions appear to involve a complex set of spatial and non-spatial i...

Empirical studies suggest that (a) language is grounded in action and (b) that the immediate past history of use influences how humans produce and comprehend spatial prepositions. We put these assumptions to the test by computationally modelling data from a spatial language task. The task required participants to place functionally related/unrelated objects on a screen w.r.t to a spatial prepos...

In this study, the use of most frequent spatial prepositions in English, Polish, Swedish, and Russian is analyzed. The prepositions and their contexts are extracted from corpora by means of concordance tools. The collostructional strength between the prepositions and the most frequent nouns in the PPs (Gries et al. 2005) is then computed in order to get a more detailed picture of the contexts i...

The goal of this paper is to offer a novel account on the Syntax and Semantics of Spanish Spatial Prepositions. This account is novel in at least three aspects. First, the account offers a unified syntactic analysis that covers understudied types of Spanish Spatial Prepositions (e.g. en el centro de, junto y a la izquierda de). Second, the account shows that such treatment can be extended to mo...

The need to communicate and reason about space is pervasive in human cognition. Consequently, most languages develop specialized terms for describing relationships between objects in space – spatial prepositions. However, the specific set of prepositions and the delineations between them vary widely. For example, in English containment relationships are categorized as in and support relationshi...

This paper offers a unified approach to Italian spatial prepositions, such as di fronte a ‘in front of’, verso ‘towards’, in ‘in’, dietro a ‘behind’, and nel mezzo di ‘in the middle of’. Three assumptions play a key role. First, Italian spatial prepositions can differ sensibly in their morphological structure, but share the same syntactic properties. Second, their sentential distribution is in ...

Prepositions such as in and on convey not only spatial relationships between objects, but also abstract relationships, such as ‘Mary is in love’ and ‘Tim’s on a roll’. Although such uses are often thought to be purely idiomatic, we hypothesized that these abstract, non-spatial relationships might preserve one specific aspect of prepositions’ spatial meaning: the degree to which the figure or th...

This article describes the application of computational models of spatial prepositions to visually situated dialog systems. In these dialogs, spatial prepositions are important because people often use them to refer to entities in the visual context of a dialog. We first describe a generic architecture for a visually situated dialog system and highlight the interactions between the spatial cogn...

English uses the same prepositions to describe both spatial and temporal relationships (e.g., at the corner, at 1:30), and other languages worldwide exhibit similar patterns. These space-time parallelisms have been explained by the Metaphoric Mapping Theory, which maintains that humans have a cognitive predisposition to structure temporal concepts in terms of spatial schemas through the applica...

In this paper I present the prepositional system of Persian. I show that Persian prepositions can be divided into three classes (Class 1, Class 2a and Class 2b) which exhibit distinct syntactic behavior. Then I examine the question of the categorial status of Class 2 prepositions and demonstrate that they are not to be regarded as nouns. Finally I present the extended PP projection of Persian s...