This paper presents an account of how literal and metaphoric readings of spatial prepositions in so-called “Boolean Phrases” can arise. The account aims to explain how metaphoric and literal readings can interact, when two (spatial) prepositional phrases are the arguments of one phrase headed by Boolean connectives and and or (e.g. in front of the car and over his problems). It is shown that th...

Rather than specifying spatial relations with a closed-class set of prepositions, American Sign Language (ASL) encodes spatial relations using space itself via classifier constructions. In these constructions, handshape morphemes specify object type, and the position of the hands in signing space schematically represents the spatial relation between objects. A [15O]water PET study was conducted...

In this paper we present a Qualitative Spatial Reasoning formalism for the treatment of the polysemy of the prepositions “sobre” and “sob”. These prepositions are mainly used to express verticality in the Brazilian Portuguese. Through queries in grammars, we established 22 meanings for these prepositions and then we did a Corpus search to see how these prepositions are used in practice. We obta...

A [(15)O]water PET experiment was conducted to investigate the neural regions engaged in processing constructions unique to signed languages: classifier predicates in which the position of the hands in signing space schematically represents spatial relations among objects. Ten deaf native signers viewed line drawings depicting a spatial relation between two objects (e.g., a cup on a table) and ...

Although direction plays an important role in the semantics of prepositions and verbs, there are not many precise and systematic treatments of this notion. This article offers a characterization and typology of directionality, based on two algebraic properties of spatial paths: cumulativity and reversability. This typology makes clear how directionality relates to the aspectual property of teli...

This paper studies some newly observed phenomena with indefinite descriptions when they appear as complements of prepositional phrases (PPs). We show that in many such cases the indefinite does not receive the traditional existential interpretation, and its quantificational force is sensitive to the identity of the preposition. Such cases of quantificational variability are explained by elabora...

This paper addresses vector space models of prepositions, a notoriously ambiguous word class. We propose a rank-based distance measure to explore the vector-spatial properties of the ambiguous objects, focusing on two research tasks: (i) to distinguish polysemous from monosemous prepositions in vector space; and (ii) to determine salient vector-space features for a classification of preposition...

Topological relativity is a concept of interest in geographic information theory. One way of assessing the importance of topology in spatial reasoning is to analyze commonplace terms from natural language relative to conceptual neighborhood graphs, the alignment structures of choice for topological relations. Sixteen English-language spatial prepositions for regionregion relations were analyzed...

Following a similar method to that of Mark and Egenhofer (1994), a questionnaire-based experiment tested for possible effects of scale, context and spatial relation type on the acceptability of spatial prepositions. The results suggest that the previous assumption of scale invariance in spatial language is ultimately meaningless. The physical world as experienced by humans, and described by hum...