Well‐Hidden Regularities: Abstract Uses ofinandonRetain an Aspect of Their Spatial Meaning

Abstract

Prepositions name spatial relationships (e.g., book on a table). But they are also used to convey abstract, non-spatial relationships (e.g., Adrian is on a roll)-raising the question of how the abstract uses relate to the concrete spatial uses. Despite considerable success in delineating these relationships, no general account exists for the two most frequently extended prepositions: in and on. We test the proposal that what is preserved in abstract uses of these prepositions is the relative degree of control between the located object (the figure) and the reference object (the ground). Across four experiments, we find a continuum of greater figure control for on (e.g., Jordan is on a roll) and greater ground control for in (e.g., Casey is in a depression). These findings bear on accounts of semantic structure and language change, as well as on second language instruction.

Spatial analogies pervade complex relational reasoning: Evidence from spontaneous gestures

“…This tendency can be seen in the spatial words and grammatical structures people draw on to talk about abstract domains, including time and others (Brugman, 1988; Clark, 1973; Heine, 1997; Jamrozik & Gentner, 2015; Traugott, 1978). In fact, evidence has now accumulated that this is not just a linguistic phenomenon—people draw on spatial representations when reasoning online about abstract concepts, whether or not language is involved (Boroditsky, 2001; Casasanto & Bottini, 2014).…”

Learning Simple Spatial Terms: Core and More

“…Is “the tattoo on my hand” truly a kind of support? Other relationships that naturally engage the terms in/on are likely to be even more abstract, far from the physical situations we have been discussing, for example, “She was in a rage” or “He was on Social Security.” However, as Jamrozik and Gentner () have shown, even these cases appear to exhibit remnants of the spatial and force‐dynamic meanings that intuitively characterize our most basic notions of containment and support. The idea that children approach language learning with core notions underlying the semantics of simple spatial terms in/on thus not only helps explain how children quickly learn to express these notions with basic linguistic expressions, but also confirms the role of these core spatial meanings in the rich and variable leaps that the human mind can make—both in spatial cognition and in spatial language.…”

“…Importantly, even in English, the uses of in and on often stray far from core exemplars (see Fig. ); this becomes especially clear for highly abstract uses of these terms (Jamrozik & Gentner, ). For example, English speakers can use in to encode not only apples in bowls, but also flowers in a vase (where the flower blossoms are not actually contained within the physical boundaries of the vase) and holes in a sock (where the holes are negative spaces that are not in any obvious way “contained” by the sock).…”

Editor's Introduction: 2017 Rumelhart Prize Issue Honoring Lila R. Gleitman

“…Landau (, ) also pushes the role of syntax in learning words that many would consider “easy words”—the simplest spatial prepositions in English, in and on. Much discussion about the acquisition of these prepositions has focused on the very broad range of application of the terms (e.g., Jamrozik & Gentner, ) and their cross‐linguistic variability (Levinson & Wilkins, ), leading some to eschew the idea that there are "core" concepts that underlie children's earliest acquisition. Taking as a starting point the idea that the syntactic distribution of a word is a reflection of its meaning, Landau proposes that careful study of how adults and children linguistically encode a range of spatial configurations in the domains of containment and support reveals a special status for configurations that represent “core” concepts in each domain.…”