Spatial language: Meaning, use, and lexical choice

Accounts of spatial language aim to address both the meaning of a spatial term and its usage patterns across diverse cases, but do not always clearly distinguish these from one another. Focusing on the case of English prepositions in and on, we set out to disentangle spatial language meaning from spatial language use by comparing judgments on a series of linguistic tasks designed to tap each aspect of spatial language. We demonstrate that judgments of truth-conditional meaning and patterns of naturalistic use show different distributional signatures, with judgments of meaning giving rise to a more uniform distribution than use patterns. We explore a third aspect of spatial language: lexical choice, and propose that choice is a key factor in shaping the distribution of spatial expression use. Our analyses reveal that the distribution of lexical choice judgments is highly correlated with the distribution of expression use in spatial descriptions for the same spatial scenes, supporting a model of spatial language that differs from traditional accounts of meaning and categorization.