This paper introduces a compositional semantics of locative prepositional phrases which is based on a vector space ontology. Model-theoretic properties of prepositions like monotonicity and conservativity are defined in this system in a straightforward way. These notions are shown to describe central inferences with spatial expressions and to account for the grammaticality of preposition modifi...

Prepositions name spatial relationships (e.g., book on a table), but also abstract, non-spatial relationships (e.g., Jordan is on a roll)—raising the question of how the abstract uses relate to the concrete spatial uses. The two most frequently extended prepositions are in and on, and there has been no consensus about what aspects of spatial meaning they retain when used abstractly. We propose ...

In order to understand the spatial meaning of an utterance, comprehenders must integrate the spatial semantics of verbs and prepositions. For example, the spatial interpretation of at is typically non-directional, simply specifying a location in space: in the sentence Amy ran at the track, at only specifies the location of the running event. However, in the phrase threw at, the inherent directi...

This paper shows the f a l l acy of th is claim. It addresses the problem of i n te rp re t ing and generating " l o c a t i v e p red i ca t i ons " (expressions made up of two noun-phrases gove rned by a preposi t ion used spa t i a l l y ) . It i d e n t i f i e s and describes a number of o b j e c t c h a r a c t e r i s t i c s beyond shape (sect ion I) and contextual f a c t o r s (sec t...

The objective in this paper is to present a framework for a system that describes objects in a qualitative fashion. A subset of spatial prepositions is chosen and an appropriate quantiication is applied to each of them that capture their inherent qualitative properties. The quantiications use such object attributes as area, centers, and elonga-tion properties. The familiar zeroth, rst, and seco...

In this paper the results of three experiments are reported which address the issue of the relative extent to which functional relations versus geometric relations affect spatial language. The experiments examine the role of a discourse context on the use and rating of the preposition in to describe a visual scene where the constraint of spatial containment between figure (object located) and g...

This paper deals with issues that a bidirectional GermanRussian machine translation system faces when the meaning of spatial prepositions in these languages does not line up. A uniform representation language is used to define the meaning of spatial prepositions in a language independent way. This formal language makes it possible to compare monolingual meaning representations and allows for th...

Many natural languages use prepositions to mark relations between entities of various kinds – between physical entities and their spatial locations, between temporal entities and their temporal locations, between abstract entities of various kinds (e.g. between ideas and their ‘mental locations’). In the current paper I will show that the consequences of using prepositions to relate temporal en...