Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.