Although direction plays an important role in the semantics of prepositions and verbs, there are not many precise and systematic treatments of this notion. This article offers a characterization and typology of directionality, based on two algebraic properties of spatial paths: cumulativity and reversability. This typology makes clear how directionality relates to the aspectual property of teli...

This paper studies some newly observed phenomena with indefinite descriptions when they appear as complements of prepositional phrases (PPs). We show that in many such cases the indefinite does not receive the traditional existential interpretation, and its quantificational force is sensitive to the identity of the preposition. Such cases of quantificational variability are explained by elabora...

This paper addresses vector space models of prepositions, a notoriously ambiguous word class. We propose a rank-based distance measure to explore the vector-spatial properties of the ambiguous objects, focusing on two research tasks: (i) to distinguish polysemous from monosemous prepositions in vector space; and (ii) to determine salient vector-space features for a classification of preposition...

The cognitive neuroscience of semantics has focused largely on object knowledge. By contrast, spatial semantics, especially as related to language, has received little attention. Spatial thought and language gives our semantic system a rich texture by introducing relational thinking and greater levels of abstraction than is evoked by object semantics. This article describes the neural instantia...

we quantified the distribution, abundance and assemblage structure of macrofauna at 22 stations in gorgan bay, seasonally in 2012-2013. also, depth, temperature, salinity, do, tom and sediment particle size were measured in each station. the highest concentration of tom was measured near the western littoral zone (10.22) while the mouth part and north-eastern area was characterized by the lowes...

Topological relativity is a concept of interest in geographic information theory. One way of assessing the importance of topology in spatial reasoning is to analyze commonplace terms from natural language relative to conceptual neighborhood graphs, the alignment structures of choice for topological relations. Sixteen English-language spatial prepositions for regionregion relations were analyzed...

Following a similar method to that of Mark and Egenhofer (1994), a questionnaire-based experiment tested for possible effects of scale, context and spatial relation type on the acceptability of spatial prepositions. The results suggest that the previous assumption of scale invariance in spatial language is ultimately meaningless. The physical world as experienced by humans, and described by hum...

This paper introduces a compositional semantics of locative prepositional phrases which is based on a vector space ontology. Model-theoretic properties of prepositions like monotonicity and conservativity are defined in this system in a straightforward way. These notions are shown to describe central inferences with spatial expressions and to account for the grammaticality of preposition modifi...

in this paper the minimum temperatures of 54 weather stations collected for a 31-year period were analyzed for zoning the frost regions in iran. the results of this study show that the average of the number of frost days per year was 62, and the average temperature was 3 degrees of centigrade below zero. dey the tenth month in the iranian calendar, december 22-january 20 with an average of 28, ...