Chapter 2 - The general structure of spatial constructions

2014

An account of spatial semantics cannot fail to encompass three basic notions: location, change of location, and shape. While shapes can be considered to be properties of objects with a spatial dimension, locations and paths are relations between such objects. Most of the semantic and morphosyntactic literature, therefore concentrates on locations and paths. Without pursuing the intricacies of the semantics and logic of these notions, we take them to be basic and address the question of how these notions are reflected in syntax and morphology. There are indeed languages in which there is a direct grammatical correlate of the notions location and path. Accordingly, and following Jackendoff (1983) and Koopman (1993), we take the abstract structure of a spatial phrase in the verbal domain to be [V ' V o [PP DIR o [P ' LOC o [N ' N o] ] ]]. Our purpose here is to present new evidence for such a structure based on locality considerations. A robust notion of locality (heads ...

The past two decades have seen the formation of a body of literature on the syntax and semantics of spatial expressions. Much of the syntactic work has been within the cartographic approach, which seeks to identify the functional sequence of a given domain (e.g., the papers contained in Cinque and Rizzi, 2010). In this section, I will first outline an analysis of English spatial P under the cartographic approach (Svenonius, 2010). I will then discuss some problems with how this approach treats directionalized locatives. PlaceP Place between KP the pylons b. Directionalized PP (following Svenonius, 2010) PathP Path ∅ PlaceP Place between KP the pylons

Revista Espanola De Linguistica Aplicada, 2004

This paper consists of a critical review of how spatial prepositions and adverbial particles have been treated in the literature. After examining traditional grammars' description of locational expressions until the present moment, some of the main and most recent ideas related to spatial analysis of prepositions and adverbs are put forward. These two opposed positions in relation to the way of categorizing them are presented and discussed. As a result of the data gathered, and starting from a functional paradigm, a new classification of such items is proposed. Therefore, clear boundaries are established to account for the distinction between prepositions and adverbs.

The Linguistic Review, 2020

In many languages, it is possible to describe the location of any entity with respect to a landmark object without specifying the exact place that the locatum occupies (e.g. English at in at home). Such vocabulary items usually contrast with items that belong to the same categories but have more restricted senses (e.g. on top of in on top of the shelf). Thus, the degree of "abstractness" that such spatial case markers can convey usually depends on the organization of the lexicon and grammar of spatial terms in each language. The goal of this paper is to explore these properties across a small sample of languages and offer an account of this variation that is connected to previous theories of spatial case markers (e.g. adpositions). Our key proposal is that the morpho-syntactic structure of spatial case markers and their phrases can license a clear division of labour between functional and lexical spatial senses. However, intermediate solutions blurring categories and semantic boundaries are shown to be possible. We formalize this proposal via a fragment of Lexical Syntax, and show that degrees of distinction between 'functional' and 'lexical' sense types and categories can be modelled via a unified account.

Language, 2003

Most approaches to spatial language have assumed that the simplest spatial notions are (after Piaget) topological and universal (containment, contiguity, proximity, support, represented as semantic primitives such as IN, ON, UNDER, etc.). These concepts would be coded directly in language, above all in small closed classes such as adpositions--thus providing a striking example of semantic categories as language-specific projections of universal conceptual notions. This idea, if correct, should have as a consequence that the semantic categories instantiated in spatial adpositions should be essentially uniform crosslinguistically. This article attempts to verify this possibility by comparing the semantics of spatial adpositions in nine unrelated languages, with the help of a standard elicitation procedure, thus producing a preliminary semantic typology of spatial adpositional systems. The differences between the languages turn out to be so significant as to be incompatible with stronger versions of the UNIVERSAL CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES hypothesis. Rather, the language-specific spatial adposition meanings seem to emerge as compact subsets of an underlying semantic space, with certain areas being statistical ATTRACTORS or FOCI. Moreover, a comparison of systems with different degrees of complexity suggests the possibility of positing implicational hierarchies for spatial adpositions. But such hierarchies need to be treated as successive divisions of semantic space, as in recent treatments of basic color terms. This type of analysis appears to be a promising approach for future work in semantic typology.* A DISTILLATION OF HUMAN SPATIAL COGNITION. In studies of spatial language, a standard line or set of orthodox assumptions has arisen, along the following lines: 1. The simplest spatial notions are topological-concepts of proximity, contiguity, containment (Piaget & Inhelder 1956). 2. Such notions can be taken to be either primitive, so that we have conceptual primes like IN, ON, UNDER (Jackendoff 1983), or near-primitive, so that, for example, IN is decomposed in terms of at least partial INCLUSION (Miller & Johnson-Laird 1976). 3. These concepts are more or less directly coded in spatial language, above all in the closed-class spatial relators like prepositions and postpositions, which have (comparatively) simple semantics (Talmy 1983), largely universal in nature since they correspond to elements of our neurocognition (Landau & Jackendoff 1993). Consequently, 'we can develop a fairly comprehensive idea of the spatial relations expressed in language by focusing on spatial prepositions' (Landau & Jackendoff 1993:223). 4. Hence, the topological adpositions are among the earliest linguistic concepts learned by children (Johnston & Slobin 1979), and in learning them children map * Colleagues in the Language and Cognition Group who provided crucial data are: Jtirgen Bohnemeyer,

Proceedings of Les Decembrettes 8 (tentative).

The goal of this paper is to offer a unified analysis of the morphological structure of spatial adpositions and spatial case markers in three languages: English, Spanish, and Finnish. This analysis combines Distributed Morphology assumptions with a Type-Logical formal treatment. Two key results emerge from this unified morpho-syntactic analysis. First, spatial adpositions (behind, encima, laelta) can be accounted as the result of merging different “types” of spatial morphemes, including spatial case markers and particles. Second, cross-linguistic syntactic phenomena involving these categories (e.g. argument demotion) can also be accounted for straightforwardly, via our analysis. We suggest that these results also support a “morphology all the way up” view of Distributed Morphology.

Corela, 2010

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Proceedings of the 15th Seoul International Conference Of Generative Grammar (SICOGG 15), 2013

This paper presents a Distributed Morphology approach to the morphology and semantics of spatial prepositions (in front of) and anaphors (here), complete with a situation semantics interpretation. The proposal is shown to account both known and recalcitrant data, such as anaphoric relations between elements of the two categories. Ideal follow-up to the "Borealis" paper.

ling, 1993

This paper gives a cross-linguistic comparison of the way information is organized for expression in descriptions in English and German, given the same communicative tasks. The study focuses on factors governing the use of spatial concepts and the ways in which they are mapped into linguistic form. This involves a comparison of the concepts used in linearizing information and establishing cohesion in descriptions and shows how systematic preferences for one set of spatial concepts over another when describing the relative location of objects can be attributed to general principles of organization at text level. The grammatical and lexical structure of locative expressions in English and German also reflects requirements defined by language-specific patterns of information organization. These factors lead to different preferences in conceptualizing subject matter for expression, given a specific communicative task.

Iberia 5(2), 30-87, 2013

The goal of this paper is to propose a unification of two strands of research within the semantics of spatial prepositions. The first strand focuses on the so-called modification problem, which can be stated as follows. Some, but not all spatial prepositions can occur in sentences including measure phrases, such as ten meters (Mario went ten meters in front of the car). The second strand focuses on so-called prepositional aspect: the fact that some but not all spatial prepositions can occur with temporal adverbial phrases such as in one hour. A unified account is proposed, based on a minimal version of Type-Logical syntax combined with situation semantics. This unified account is shown to explain and predict why, for instance, telic prepositions cannot occur with measure phrases (viz. *ten meters to the park). A compositional analysis of the contribution to lexical aspect of measure phrases, and their compositional interplay with spatial prepositions and temporal adverbials, is offered in detail. The main conclusion is that measure phrases do contribute to the lexical aspect reading of a sentence, but do so in fairly subtle (and compositionally-based) ways.