Contemporary grammars of Hausa (Newman, 2000; Jaggar, 2001) recognise three major classes within the set of prepositions: a restricted set of basic (true) prepositions, a set of complex prepositions, and a set of genitive prepositions. Among the set of 14 basic prepositions listed in Jaggar (2001), we find, inter alia, à ‘in, at, on etc.’, dàgà ‘from’, dà ‘with’, zuw `̄ a ‘towards’, ta ‘via, by ...

This paper explores from a neuropsychological perspective the relation between the meanings of English locative prepositions (e.g., in, on, above, below) and the kinds of representations that are used for many visuospatial processes such as recognising, drawing, and constructing spatially complex objects. One possibility that has been proposed by some psycholinguists is that the meanings of pre...

Regier and Carlson (2001) have investigated the processing of spatial prepositions and developed a cognitive model that formalizes how spatial prepositions are evaluated against depicted spatial relations between objects. In their Attentional Vector Sum (AVS) model, a population of vectors is weighted with visual attention, rooted at the reference object and pointing to the located object. The ...

In this paper we present a framework for interpreting locative expressions containing the prepositions in front of and behind. These prepositions have different semantics in the viewer-centred and intrinsic frames of reference (Vandeloise, 1991). We define a model of their semantics in each frame of reference. The basis of these models is a novel parameterized continuum function that creates a ...

Several studies of L2 learners’ interlanguage have addressed the complexity of the English adpositional system due to several reasons like L1 transfer, lack of knowledge in L2 and the strong collocational relations of prepositions with other elements of the English language. The major purpose of the present study is to evaluate the performance of Iranian students in dealing with three broad cat...

We are developing a system in which a user can control virtual agents through natural language dialogue. We particularly focus on the semantic analysis of spatial expressions in natural language instructions. Spatial expressions are relative to the speaker’s viewpoint and the indicated positions can change dynamically. In this paper we propose a semantic representation using lambda structures. ...

This paper1 deals with the definition of a computational semantics for spatial relations between objects in a scene. In particular we examine the effects of the observer's position on the computation of spatial relations, the use of path prepositions, and degrees of applicability for spatial relations. Representational prerequisites and the computational analysis of spatial relations are invest...