Internet Archive Scholar

UC Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Title Prepositions in and on retain aspects of spatial meaning in abstract contexts Publication Date Prepositions retain aspects of spatial meaning in abstract contexts

Anja Jamrozik, Dedre Gentner
1992 Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society   unpublished

Preserved Fulltext

fulltext thumbnail
Web Archive Capture PDF (292.7 kB)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180430171030/https://cloudfront.escholarship.org/dist/prd/content/qt0kd5r1db/qt0kd5r1db.pdf?t=op32e4

A copy of this work was available on the public web and has been preserved in the Wayback Machine. The capture dates from 2018; you can also visit the original URL. The file type is application/pdf.

Prepositions such as in and on convey not only spatial relationships between objects, but also abstract relationships, such as 'Mary is in love' and 'Tim's on a roll'. Although such uses are often thought to be purely idiomatic, we hypothesized that these abstract, non-spatial relationships might preserve one specific aspect of prepositions' spatial meaning: the degree to which the figure or the ground controls the figure-ground relationship (Coventry We found that locus of control
more » ... in and on in common abstract metaphorical contexts (e.g., in love/on a roll), matched abstract contexts (e.g., in/on time), and novel abstract contexts. These findings suggest that prepositions retain aspects of their spatial meaning when used abstractly.
fatcat:wa3maqg32jh3nlxp6os64i7g5m
Citation

Anja Jamrozik, Dedre Gentner. "UC Merced Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Title Prepositions in and on retain aspects of spatial meaning in abstract contexts Publication Date Prepositions retain aspects of spatial meaning in abstract contexts." Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 33.33 (1992)