Contextual processing of locative prepositional phrases

This paper deals with contextual aspects of locative preposition processing. Firstly, accordingly to a study on the referential behavior of the pronominal adverb ”y” in its locative uses, we show that static locative prepositions are functions, not only at the conceptual level (as shown in previous studies), but also from a contextual point of view. Such functions introduce new objects in the discourse context, that have to be taken into account in classical contextual processing tasks, such as reference resolution or question answering. Then, we show how these phenomena can fit into contextual formalisms like DRT and DPL.