Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper argues that the basic modes of spatial cognition can be best identified in terms of argument/participant location, and shows that natural language uses "simple" types of semantic denotations to encode spatial cognition. First we review event-based approaches to spatial location, and point out that spatial expressions should be interpreted not as locating an event/state as a whole but as locating arguments/participants of the sentence/event. Section 2 identifies the ways of locating events/states in terms "argument orientation", which indicates the ways of interpreting locative expressions. We identify four patterns of argument orientation which reveal substantial modes of spatial cognition—spatial properties and relations. Section 3 illustrates various classes of English transitive verbs with which spatial expressions induce argument orientation. We consider four types of locative prepositional phrases and show that the argument orientation pattern of a sentence is not determined by the type of spatial expressions but mostly by the type of the verb, i.e., the event type of the sentence. Section 4 concludes that semantic denotations of locative prepositional phrases are restricted to the "intersecting" functions mapping relations to relations, which are "basic and familiar" semantic objects out of the "heterogeneous" field of functions from relations to relations.