Contemporary grammars of Hausa (Newman, 2000; Jaggar, 2001) recognise three major classes within the set of prepositions: a restricted set of basic (true) prepositions, a set of complex prepositions, and a set of genitive prepositions. Among the set of 14 basic prepositions listed in Jaggar (2001), we find, inter alia, à ‘in, at, on etc.’, dàgà ‘from’, dà ‘with’, zuw `̄ a ‘towards’, ta ‘via, by ...

The present study deals with the impairment of prepositions, a somewhat neglected topic in aphasia research. It is the first to investigate the availability of all types of prepositions (i.e., spatial, temporal, other meaningful, subcategorized, syntactic prepositions, and particles) in a variety of comprehension and production tasks in one anomic aphasic and four Broca’s aphasic patients and h...

One of the most problematic areas for teachers and learners in English classrooms is prepositions. Two types of prepositions in English are spatial (space) and temporal (time) prepositions. Prepositions are words linking two entities and thereby specifying the relation of the two. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the role of games and flash cards in learning place and time prep...

This paper presents a lexical account of the syntax of Sorani Kurdish prepositions within the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Kurdish dialects have a rich class of prepositions and prepositional collocations with a complex syntactic behavior (Edmonds 1955, Mackenzie 1961). This situation results from severla factors. The first one involves the constitution of this clas...

We investigate the task of predicting prepositions that can be used to describe the spatial relationships between pairs of objects depicted in images. We explore the extent to which such spatial prepositions can be predicted from (a) language information, (b) visual information, and (c) combinations of the two. In this paper we describe the dataset of object pairs and prepositions we have creat...

The context for the work we report here is the automatic description of spatial relationships between pairs of objects in images. We investigate the task of selecting prepositions for such spatial relationships. We describe the two datasets of object pairs and prepositions we have created for English and French, and report results for predicting prepositions for object pairs in both of these la...

Lexical pragmatics starts from the assumption that the meaning communicated by a word is underdetermined by its semantics, and lexical pragmatists usually study the processes involved in bridging the gap between the encoded and the communicated meaning of words. This paper studies a di erent but related question: wether di erent types of linguistic encoding can play empirically distinguishable ...

The present work is concerned with projective prepositions, which express the relation between two objects by referring to a direction in three-dimensional space. The projective prepositions have been regarded as expressing simple schematic relations of a geometric nature. A theory of the apprehension of projective relations can account for their meanings when they express strictly geometric re...