Spatial prepositions are linguistic tools to exchange information about spatial location of objects. For instance “The book is over the table” indicates that the located object (LO) is somewhere “over” the reference object (RO). Assigning direction to space (selecting a reference frame) is a necessary precursor to understanding where the LO is located. Three experiments are reported which inves...

Cognitive agents use different strategies to identify relevant spatial information in communication. The chosen strategy depends on the agents’ conceptualization of the spatial situation at hand. This situation is determined by structural and functional aspects that are induced by the environment and the actions performed or intended therein. In this paper, we are interested in conceptualizatio...

Spatial prepositions work as pointers to localize objects in space. For instance “The book is over the table” indicates that the located object (LO) is somewhere “over” the reference object (RO). To understand where the LO is people need to assign direction to space (selecting a reference frame). Three experiments are reported which investigated the reference frame conflict between LO and RO. W...

There is much empirical evidence showing that factors other than the relative positions of objects in Euclidean space are important in the comprehension of a wide range of spatial prepositions in English and other languages. We first the overview the functional geometric framework (Coventry & Garrod, 2004) which puts “what” and “where” information together to underpin the situation specific mea...

A mong the most frequently used words in English are simple prepositions like in or on whose basic meaning is spatial in character. What we propose in this article is a classification of the kinds of geometry that underlie the basic meaning of various spatial prepositions. The distinctions among geometries underlying these prepositions has not, as far as we can tell, been previously noted in th...

Our study explores perception of urban environment and its encoding into the system of spatial prepositions. We explore the divergences between the physical topology and the cognitive topology of environment constrained by (a) geometric invariants (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993), (b) functional knowledge (Coventry & Garrod, 2004), (c) reference frame (Levinson, 1996), and (d) individual’s spatial e...

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 quantification is applied to each of them that capture their inherent qualitative properties. The quantifications use such object attributes as area, centers, and elongation properties. The familiar zeroth, first, and s...

This work presents the semantical analysis of the two spatial prepositions and associated prefixes, the French sur, sur-(on) and the Polish przez, prze-(across). We propose a theory of abstract places (loci), as a method of description which helps to build an invariant meanings of the two linguistics units. 1 Introduction Natural languages encode spatial and temporal representations in many var...