Abstract
In this paper we present an experimental study on native speakers’ access to lexical relations among spatial relations. Our main focus is a still poorly understood domain: the lexical relations that hold between (pairs of) directional spatial prepositions (from, to) and locative prepositions (at). Two broad families of proposals exist in the literature. One family suggests that the members of these two classes of prepositions are connected via the entailment relation. Another family suggests that the overlap relation connects directional and locative prepositions. These two proposals differ with respect to the predictions they make on how speakers can accept and logically connect sentences that include such pairs of prepositions. We offer an experimental study, based on a variant of the Truth-Value Judgment Task, which aims to adjudicate which family of proposals makes the correct predictions. Then, we discuss the theoretical import of the results.
Highlights
Many recent works in experimental semantics have investigated in detail the interpretation of Spatial Prepositions (Feist 2008; Feist and Gentner 2012; Coventry, Tenbrink and Bateman 2009; Coventry and Mix 2010)
The experimental evidence we reviewed so far seems to remain silent on which lexical relations holds between directional and locative SPs
If we take a confidence interval of 5% as the possibility participants answered correctly by chance, this result is in part skewed, not in a statistically significant way. This result invites the conclusion that participants could access the senses of to, from and at as per predictions; their answers to the follow-up questions evidenced which lexical relation they accessed
Summary
Many recent works in experimental semantics have investigated in detail the interpretation of Spatial Prepositions (Feist 2008; Feist and Gentner 2012; Coventry, Tenbrink and Bateman 2009; Coventry and Mix 2010). Two core questions have guided this research. A first question is how speakers access the senses of Spatial Prepositions (: SPs), and adjudicate whether or not they describe an extra-linguistic context. A second question is whether speakers can access the lexical relations that hold among SPs in a given context. Coventry and Garrod (2004: ch.2-3) investigated whether speakers would accept (1)-(2) as adequate descriptions of different pictures showing a basket containing an apple with different degrees of inclusion:. (1) The apple is on the basket (2) The apple is in the basket
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