Spatial Prepositions In Context: The Semantics Of 'near' In The Presence Of Distractor Objects

The paper examines how people’s judgements of proximity between two objects are influenced by the presence of a third object. In an experiment participants were presented with images containing three shapes in different relative positions, and asked to rate the acceptability of a locative expression such as ‘the circle is near the triangle’ as descriptions of those images. The results showed an interaction between the relative positions of objects and the linguistic roles that those objects play in the locative expression: proximity was a decreasing function of the distance between the head object in the expression and the prepositional clause object, and an increasing function the distance between the head and the third, distractor object. This finding leads us to a new account for the semantics of spatial prepositions such as near.