The present study investigated how children learn that some verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground-locative construction (e.g., Lisa poured water into the cup; *Lisa poured the cup with water), with some showing the opposite pattern (e.g., *Bart filled water into the cup; Bart filled the cup with water), and others appearing in both (Lisa sprayed water onto the flowers; Lisa...

The Japanese existential construction can be used either to assert the presence of something/someone in a certain location (the locative reading) or to indicate that something is an integral part of another (the part-whole reading). It has been noted, however, that the part-whole reading seems to disappear when the nominative NP precedes the locative PP. Contrary to the existing analyses which ...

The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) is known to be involved in the processing of syntactic complexity, such as word order variation. It is also known to be involved in semantic interpretation in studies of various types of semantic and pragmatic anomalies. Across neuroimaging studies of language processing, two main approaches can be found, one that contrasts anomalous and well-formed words ...

This paper presents a framework for generating locative expressions. The framework addresses the issue of combinatorial explosion inherent in the construction of relational context models by: (a) contextually defining the set of objects in the context that may function as a landmark, and (b) sequencing the order in which spatial relations are considered using a cognitively motivated hierarchy o...

In this paper, we present a novel approach using LDA (Latent Dirichlet Analysis, Blei, David, Andrew, Michael, and Jordan, 2003) to analyze synonym groups appearing in fixed frames containing Chinese locative phrases, such as [zái noun phrase (yǐ/zhī) shàng/xià/etc. biān/miàn/etc.], and to understand noun meanings related to the syntactic forms of locative phrases. We mapped the different noun ...

This paper proposes a syntax-semantics correspondence of locative expressions: This proposal is based on the syntactic hierarchy among three locative structures (PPs, VPs, and verbal affixes) and the semantic hierarchy among four locative arguments (Goal, Source, Symmetric Path, Stative Location). As for the syntactic hierarchy, the verbal affixes are closer to the head verb than the locative/p...

Abstract This study is based on a sample of 116 languages from the Mainland East and Southeast Asian linguistic area. Its first objective to examine four distinct synchronic patterns areal polysemy, created by semantic domains copular, locative, existential possessive verbs constructions they form. As consequence, its second model diachronic change underlying language types identified this basi...

Bresnan (1994), based on data in English and Chicheŵa, proposes that the discourse function of locative inversion construction (LIC) is presentational focus, in which the referent of the NP ‘is introduced or reintroduced on the (part of the) scene referred to by the preposed locative’. Pan (1996) suggests that the discourse function of LIC in Chinese is the same. In this paper, I investigate tw...