The prepositional inventory of languages: A factor that affects comprehension of spatial prepositions

Abstract

Miller and Johnson-Laird's Language and Perception (1976) can be considered a starting point of the psychological and linguistic investigation into deictic and intrinsic spatial reference, i.e. into the use and the comprehension of spatial prepositions and their corresponding spatial concepts. Important factors that affect the choice of either the deictic or the intrinsic frame of reference have been suggested to be the discourse context, the static vs. dynamic characteristics of the described situation, the individual cognitive style, and the intrinsic orientation of the reference object. However, the explanatory determination of people's actual use of spatial expressions is far from being satisfactory. We conducted a series of experiments in German, Dutch, French, Italian and English in order to show that four factors systematically interact when people interpret spatial expressions: (1) the reference object being intrinsically oriented or not; (2) the preposition that is used; (3) the social characteristics of the discourse situation; (4) the prepositional inventory of the language at issue, as regards its spatial and temporal prepositions. Particularly, factors (3) and (4) allow for a more comprehensive explanation of the empirical results, compared to the hitherto proposed approaches. In all five languages, some communicative fuzziness, or ambiguity, remains; however, it occurs in different cases, depending on the prepositional inventories of the respective languages.