{"pk":49810,"title":"Spatial Terms in English Plus Twelve Languages:  Evidence for Functional and Geometric Classes","subtitle":null,"abstract":"A long-standing open question concerns the universal properties of the representations of spatial expressions, specifically, the question of whether they fall into two separate classes, functional/ force-dynamic vs. geometric (Landau, 2025). Recently Viechnicki et al. (2024) proposed a new method for examining spatial expressions across languages by filtering massive parallel text corpora for basic locative constructions (BLCs); that study showed promising but tentative and limited evidence for the two classes of spatial expressions across languages.  The current study replicates and extends those overall findings using a larger corpus and a more effective filtration technique.  Experiment 1 analyzes cross-linguistic variational patterns from a corpus of parallel BLCs from 12 languages, finding distinct patterns for functional and geometric spatial terms. Experiment 2 examines the semantics of ground objects from a large corpus of English BLCs and reveals additional evidence for two underlying classes of spatial relations.  The two experiments strengthen the evidence from web-scale corpus linguistics supporting distinct universal cognitive representations of functional vs. geometric spatial terms.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Computer Science; Linguistics; Language and thought; Natural Language Processing; Spatial cognition; Corpus studies; Cross-linguistic analysis"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/76w0k0h2","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Peter","middle_name":"","last_name":"Viechnicki","name_suffix":"","institution":"Johns Hopkins University","department":""},{"first_name":"Zandi","middle_name":"","last_name":"Eberstadt","name_suffix":"","institution":"Johns Hopkins University","department":""},{"first_name":"Barbara","middle_name":"","last_name":"Landau","name_suffix":"","institution":"Johns Hopkins University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49810/galley/37772/download/"}]}