Influences of Form and Function on the Acceptability of Projective Prepositions in Swedish

Abstract

Projective prepositions express the relation between two objects by referring to a direction in space and have traditionally been regarded as expressing purely geometric relations. Recent studies have shown that the appropriateness of English and Spanish projectives also depends on functional relations between objects. This study investigates if the acceptability of the Swedish projectives över, under, ovanför and nedanför are influenced by functional factors as well, and whether över and under are differentially influenced by function than ovanför and nedanför, as has been shown for their English cognates. It also investigates how the shape and parts of the related objects influence their functional interaction, and thereby the acceptability of the prepositions. This is done with respect to the predictions of the AVS-model, a model of the perceptual processes underlying the apprehension of projectives, which takes both the geometric and the functional relation between objects into account. It was found that acceptability judgments about the prepositions are influenced by function as their corresponding English and Spanish prepositions. The acceptability of över was more sensitive to function than ovanför, whereas under and nedanför were not differentially influenced by function, as has been shown for Spanish. It was further found that the shape and parts of both of the related objects influence acceptability regions associated with the prepositions in predictable ways, as functional interactions between objects largely depend on their parts. The results finally show that the AVSmodel needs to be further developed in order to account for the form and function of the located object.In English and Swedish, spatial expressions are usually constructed with locative prepositions, which express relations between a reference and a located object. Traditionally, locative prepositions have been seen as expressing geometric relations of a dimensional or a topological nature (see,

Attentional Distribution and Spatial Language

“…Hörberg. In [15] experiments are presented that investigated the swedish spatial prepositions ovanför, över, nevanför and under (corresponding to the english prepositions above, over, below and under) with respect to their acceptability when influenced by a functional relationship between landmark and trajector. As the AVS simulations in [10] and Experiment 2 in [12] only consider above, we restricted our simulations to the corresponding swedish preposition ovanför.…”

“…To compare the AVS and its four extensions we used data from [12, experiment 2] and [15] 2 . For both data sets the experimental setup was the following: Participants were shown a landmark and a trajector at different positions around the landmark.…”

“…We used the center of mass of the coin trajectors for the data from both [15] and [12]. This seems reasonable, because a coin is a small trajector and the functional interaction shown in Fig.…”

“…The functional interaction between landmark and trajector in [15] is divided in two types: center-of-mass aligned and center-of-mass deviant interactions. For functional interactions of the first type the center of mass of the trajector needs to be above the landmark in a strict geometric way (e.g., coin over piggy bank, see Fig.…”

“…The piggy bank with its trajector (a coin) is an example of a center-of-mass aligned functional interaction, the petrol can with its trajector (a gas pump handle) is an example of a center-of-mass deviant interaction. The functional part of most of the other landmarks used in [15] spanned the whole top of the landmark -we did not use these landmarks, because all AVS extensions would have behaved the same for such landmark objects.…”