A formalism for the treatment of polysemy of vertical prepositions in Brazilian Portuguese

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 obtained 384 sentences, which were divided into each of the 22 meanings (called precisifications). Finally, we raise six principles that guide the applicability of these prepositions: verticality, visibility, support, salience, proportionality and inclusion and we conclude that the first three principles cited are the most relevant in the use of “sobre” and “sob”.