A Computational View of the Cognitive Semantics of Spatial Prepostions

This paper outlines the linguistic semantic commitments underlying an application which automatically constructs depictions of verbal spatial descriptions. Our approach draws on the ideational view of linguistic semantics developed by Ronald Langacker in his theory of Cognitive Grammar, and the conceptual representation of physical objects from the two-level semantics of Bierwisch and Lang. In particular the dimensions of the process of conventional imagery are used as a metric for the design of our own conceptual representation.