How Nouns and Prepositions Fit Together: An Exploration of the Semantics of Locative Sentences

Sentences involving a directional preposition and 2 nouns (e.g., "The dog is under the table") were sampled from 1 corpus in Spanish and 1 in German. Several sensory-motor features of the entities denoted by the nouns (animacy, countability, solidity, etc.) were coded. These features were then submitted to analyses using pairs of prepositions as binary dependent variables (e.g., above vs. below). In both languages, nouns naming objects with particular characteristics tended to occur with particular prepositions. For example, nouns such as pedal (inanimate and partitive characteristics) and snow (inanimate and uncountable) were much more likely in sentences such as "The bicycle pedal was above the snow" than "The bicycle pedal was in front of the snow." Furthermore, the sets of nouns associated with prepositions belonging to different spatial dimensions (e.g., front vs. above) differed in more features than the sets of nouns associated with prepositions belonging to the same spatial dimension (e.g., front vs. behind). The results of this corpus analysis were confirmed in a choice task in which participants chose between sentences with the below and behind versions of the "pedal and snow" sentence.