Mapping the meaning of preposition

Joost Zwarts
Utrecht University
j.zwarts@uu.nl

Abstract

One of the difficulties in characterizing the meaning of topological prepositions like 'in' and 'on' is that they are applied to such a
variety of situations that it seems unlikely that their use can be characterized in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. An
alternative approach is to determine the extension of such prepositions in a 'semantic space', as regions that show a coherent family
resemblance structure. In the literature, the Topological Relations Pictures Set (Bowerman & Pederson 1992) has been used to elicit
topological prepositions across languages and those cross-linguistic data have been used to induce semantic maps (Levinson &
Meira 2003, Majid et al 2012). In my talk I will approach the construction of such a map from a semantic angle, by using topological
and force dynamic notions to construct a graph of topological relations. I will then investigate how Dutch prepositions map to this
graph, building on the work of Goldschmidt (2012).