The need to communicate and reason about space is pervasive in human cognition. Consequently, most languages develop specialized terms for describing relationships between objects in space – spatial prepositions. However, the specific set of prepositions and the delineations between them vary widely. For example, in English containment relationships are categorized as in and support relationshi...

Prepositions combine with nouns flexibly when describing concrete locative relations (e.g. at/on/in the school) but are rigidly prescribed when paired with abstract concepts (e.g. at risk; on Wednesday; in trouble). In the former case they do linguistic work based on their discrete semantic qualities, and in the latter they appear to serve a primarily grammatical function. We used the abstract ...

This paper offers a unified approach to Italian spatial prepositions, such as di fronte a ‘in front of’, verso ‘towards’, in ‘in’, dietro a ‘behind’, and nel mezzo di ‘in the middle of’. Three assumptions play a key role. First, Italian spatial prepositions can differ sensibly in their morphological structure, but share the same syntactic properties. Second, their sentential distribution is in ...

People often use spontaneous gestures when communicating spatial information. We investigated focal brain-injured individuals to test the hypotheses that (1) naming motion event components of manner-path (represented by verbs-prepositions in English) are impaired selectively, (2) gestures compensate for impaired naming. Patients with left or right hemisphere damage (LHD or RHD) and elderly cont...

Prepositions such as in and on convey not only spatial relationships between objects, but also abstract relationships, such as ‘Mary is in love’ and ‘Tim’s on a roll’. Although such uses are often thought to be purely idiomatic, we hypothesized that these abstract, non-spatial relationships might preserve one specific aspect of prepositions’ spatial meaning: the degree to which the figure or th...

This article describes the application of computational models of spatial prepositions to visually situated dialog systems. In these dialogs, spatial prepositions are important because people often use them to refer to entities in the visual context of a dialog. We first describe a generic architecture for a visually situated dialog system and highlight the interactions between the spatial cogn...

In this paper I present the prepositional system of Persian. I show that Persian prepositions can be divided into three classes (Class 1, Class 2a and Class 2b) which exhibit distinct syntactic behavior. Then I examine the question of the categorial status of Class 2 prepositions and demonstrate that they are not to be regarded as nouns. Finally I present the extended PP projection of Persian s...

This paper studies the semantic interaction between pairs of closely related prepositions, like in, on, over, and around, in order to determine the priorities that determine the application of these prepositions to ambiguous situations. It is proposed that the division of labour between prepositions in such situations is strongly determined by stereotypical regularities in the way spatial notio...

which the primary object is located the reference object. In order to use projective prepositions, the speaker has to establish a reference frame (that is, an orientation) that determines the direction in which the primary object is located in relation to the reference object. The reference frame can be established in different ways. One way is to use the intrinsic orientation of the reference ...

Attempts to use images as mental models of natural language sentences with spatial prepositions have been hindered by differences in level of detail between propositional and diagrammtic representations. Specifically, when propositional knowledge is modeled with an image, the level of detail of the diagrammatic representation often requires some details to be assumed. Subsequently, it becomes u...