A geometry without angles: the case for a functional geometry of spatial prepositions

This thesis develops the view that the semantics of spatial prepositions are more fully realised within a framework of functionality, incorporating knowledge of the world, than within the spatial, geometrical framework more often used to analyse prepositions. It is argued that previous approaches which support full specification of lexical entries through the use of polysemy and prototype notions are not satisfactory or psychologically valid. It will also be shown that the minimal specification Classical approaches fail to account for all uses of the locatives described. It is suggested that minimal specification of lexical entries can be achieved by means of functional controls that can provide a more psychologically valid account of the semantics of spatial prepositions. Functional geometric control relations of fContainment, fSupport and fSuperiority are proposed for IN, ON and OVER respectively. These focus on the importance of location control in prepositional choice. It is argued that such controls underlie the use of spatial prepositions. The controls are suggested to be inherently dynamic and state that the relatum object is some way able to control the location of the referent object. For example, the use of the preposition IN is guided by the principle of fContainment which operates on the basic premise that the relatum (y) controls the location of the referent (x) such that when y moves there will be a correlated movement in x (or uncorrelated movement within the convex hull of y) by virtue of some degree of enclosure. The control relation that guides the use of OVER is fSuperiority and it operates on the basic premise that x threatens to come into contact with y as a consequence of gravitational force. Finally, the use of the preposition ON is suggested to be guided by notions of fSupport which operates on the premise that the relatum protects the referent from the force of gravity

Implementing marine pollution policy : proposals for change

This study aims to determine the factors that affect the implementation of marine pollution policy, especially with regard to regulation of the hazardous substances which contaminate the marine environment- The purpose is to identify weaknesses in the current regulatory regime and to propose improvements. The study also aims to develop a new strategic framework for the implementation of the recent international policy commitments, which call for the complete cessation of discharges of hazardous substances into the marine environment by the year 2020. Furthermore, the study seeks to provide evidence to support or challenge current theories relating to regulation and policy implementation. Examination was made of the attitudes of environmental managers from the UK chemical industry and inspectors from the environmental agencies towards the regulatory system. These are the key personnel who operate at the regulatory interface where the policy outcome is determined. The methodology combined both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Structured interviews helped define the issues for subsequent investigation using a questionnaire survey which was sent to over 700 key personnel. Focus groups were then used to explain the survey findings and develop solutions to key regulatory problems. Statistical analysis of the survey response data revealed similarities and significant differences between the views of industry and the regulator on the effectiveness of the current Integrated Pollution Control regime. The strength of the system was perceived as its practical and pragmatic approach, coupled with a convenient and familiar bureaucracy. The weaknesses identified related to the derivation and enforcement of standards. The Environmental Quality Standards system, which underpins the regime, was acknowledged to be flawed by both operators and regulators who agreed it should be improved by the expansion in the number of priority listed chemicals, the introduction of sediment Environmental Quality Standards and Direct Toxicity Assessment of effluents. Focus groups supported the expansion of the system, but recognised that it would create a regime that was both complex and impractical. The findings were used to construct a revised model of the existing regime. Multivariate analysis of the industry response data identified 3 cluster types and significant differences were revealed between their knowledge of policy developments, their implications and the need for changes to the current system of hazardous chemical control. Operators and regulators acknowledged the existence of the mutual interdependency which has created and maintained a tight policy network (community) at the regulatory interface. Further evidence to support the existence of this community and of regulatory capture, was provided by the study data. Focus group discussions also identified the requirement for a more fundamental reappraisal of the regulatory system in order to deliver the OSPAR strategy. A new regulatory model, which incorporates process and product substitution, is proposed as a strategic framework to ensure that future policy commitments are implemented. This approach may lead to the opening up of the current tight policy network with resultant benefits for policy implementation and reduced regulatory capture. The new model could be applied by other countries within the OSPAR region and in other regions of the world, in order to improve environmental protection.the Natural Environmental Research Council and the Greenpeace Environmental Trus

Children's production of locative expressions in English : the influence of geometric and extra-geometric factors

The research in this thesis examines the influence that both geometric and extrageometric factors have on children's spatial language production. Over the years it has widely been assumed that spatial prepositions identif' where objects are in the world (geometric factors) and that this is reflected in the semantic representations of these words. More recently, researchers investigating the lexical semantics of spatial prepositions have begun to question this assumption by demonstrating that what objects are and how they are interacting can also affect the way we describe where they are in the world (extra-geometric factors). Following on from research conducted with adults that has demonstrated the importance of both of these factors on spatial language, the main aim of this thesis was to ascertain for the first time whether these factors also influenced children's spatial language production, and if so, when they became important in children's development of spatial expressions. Additionally, due to the paucity of research investigating the production of spatial terms, the Experiments reported in this theis set out to redress the balance. The research in this thesis demonstrated for the first time that both geometric and extra geometric factors influence the production of children's spatial expressions from an early age. In doing so, however, the Experiments reported here were not necessarily revealing as to the nature of the semantic representation of spatial terms, rather they highlighted a different issue; how people make distinctions during a verbal interaction. Evidence is presented that suggests a level of agreement between people regarding the nonconventional use of words. In order to distinguish between functional and non-functional situations, both adults and children used different types of spatial terms to locate an object even when they had a limited number of words in their lexicon. An approach to the whole process of prepositional production is suggested rather than concentrating on what is represented in an individual's lexicon

Geometric and functional knowledge in the acquisition of spatial language

Considerable debate surrounds the nature of spatial categories, beginning with the observation that all languages use a limited and closed set of terms to encode object location and what appears to be a large and diverse set of object relations and configurations (Talmy, 1985). In previous work, Johannes, Landau and colleagues (Johannes, Wilson, & Landau, 2012, submitted; Landau, Johannes, Skordos, & Papafragou, under review) proposed that the structure of the conceptual categories of Containment and Support that underlie spatial language is reflected in the probabilistic use of spatial terms like in and on. The work in this thesis expands on these earlier findings by exploring the nature of the conceptual information underlying probabilistic spatial expression use and the relationship between conceptual knowledge and spatial expression use across development. The studies probe relationships between adults' and children's spatial expression use and a small set of geometric features, derived from studies of pre-linguistic spatial cognition knowledge (Hespos & Baillargeon, 2001, 2008; Hespos & Spelke, 2004, 2007), and a functional feature, Locational Control, adapted from psycholinguistic studies of in and on (Garrod, Ferrier, & Campbell, 1999). The results of three studies show that adults' and children's use of different types of spatial expressions (including BE + in(side)/on (top) and lexical verbs) for a large and diverse set of Containment and Support items are predicted by different combinations of geometric and functional features. Geometric features show consistent relationships to expression use across development, while Locational Control differs in its relationship to adults' and children's use of different expression types. Parents of 4- and 6-year-old participants also provided estimates of how likely they were to use different expression types to describe the same set of experimental items to their children. Including these estimates, alongside features, in models of child expression use improved the accuracy of model predictions, particularly for children’s use of lexical verb expressions, which initially showed weak relationships to feature ratings. These findings are among the first to account for spatial language usage and development as a complex function of spatial (geometric and functional) knowledge and input environment and the first to systematically examine spatial encoding for such a diverse sample of items that are representative of the everyday object configurations that children and adults encounter in the world

Lived body architecture : an argument for lived bodies in architecture and an exploration of women\u27s lived bodies in society

This thesis is about architecture\u27s current disregard for the lived body and about the lived bodily experiences of women in Western society. Although these seem to be two different themes, they are connected. Architecture disregards the lived body, but it can never escape it. Architects design buildings from their own lived experiences of the world and architectural theorists most often write about architecture from their experience of being in the buildings they discuss. But because architecture has been built and discussed predominantly by men, Western theories of architecture reflect mainly a male interpretation. I begin by analyzing the paradigms of the body used in architectural discourse. These paradigms are not based on a female body or on lived bodily experience. Next I examine women\u27s particular experience in Western culture to find how their lived bodily experiences might differ from those described. Finally I propose lived bodies as a new paradigm for the bodies of architecture. This paradigm would incorporate the experiences of women and other bodies into architecture

Geometric and Extra-Geometric Spatial Conceptualisation: A cross-linguistic and non-verbal perspective

Almost all past empirical work exploring the Functional Geometric Framework (FGF) proposed by Coventry and Garrod (2004) for spatial language use has been based on a single language - English. Therefore the extent to which the framework applies across languages has not been established. The current thesis investigated whether geometric and extra-geometric factors affect production and comprehension of spatial language across three languages; English, Finnish and Spanish. Eight cross-linguistic appropriateness rating studies identified similarities and differences in the factors that underlie our verbal conceptualisation of space across three classes of spatial relations/terms: 1) topological relations (e.g., in/on), 2) vertical axis projective terms (e.g., above/below), and 3) horizontal axis projective terms (e.g., in front of/behind) and their Finnish and Spanish counterparts. There was support for the FGF crosslinguistically, and many of the results were in line with what has been previously discovered in research on English, although extra-geometric factors, such as conceptual knowledge and dynamic kinematic-routines, were revealed to often have different weightings in different languages. Given the importance of extra-geometric factors across languages, the second part of the thesis asks whether extra-geometric factors also influence (non-linguistic) memory for spatial object relations. This question was addressed by two non-verbal spatial memory experiments which revealed that this was the case in some circumstances. Horizontal shifts in position by a potentially horizontally mobile object were more accurately remembered in specific conditions, i.e. when the located object was positioned along the diagonal axes of the reference object rather than cardinal axes, and when the movement was against the direction of expected movement of the located object. However, location memory for vertical shifts of position, was not affected in such a way by potentially vertically mobile objects in any circumstances. In the closing chapter of the thesis the generalisability of the FGF for crosslinguistic and non-linguistic relations is discussed

Spatial prepositions and functional relations: the case for minimally specified lexical entries

In this thesis we present a minimally specified approach to the lexical entries for spatial prepositions based on the recognition of the importance of functional relations. We begin by introducing the problem of separating out senses of a lexeme from occurrences of a lexeme, and with a consideration of methods of sense delineation, including ambiguity tests.We then consider classical approaches to the lexical entries of prepositions which favour minimal specification of lexical entries, and compare them to cognitive linguistic accounts which favour full specification of lexical entries. It is argued that classical accounts have problems with case accountability, while cognitive linguistic accounts are based on a misinterpretation of prototype theory. We demonstrate that the accounts are very similar in that they delineate senses in terms of different geometric relations in the world.Functional relations are introduced as an alternative way of understanding spatial relations. It is argued that what is important about objects is how they interact with each other, that is, the functional relations between objects. The work of Garrod and Sanford (1989) and Talmy (1988) is considered in this context, and is developed to deal more adequately with case accountability.A number of experimental studies are reported which demonstrate the existence of functional relations, and cast doubt on ambiguity tests as valid methods of sense delineation. It is proposed that a spatial preposition can be said to have two senses if a language user has a motivated reason for distinguishing between two types of relation. Evidence is provided for a distinction between spatial prepositions which involve functional components, and those that involve purely geometric components. First language acquisition evidence is reviewed which suggests that prepositions involving functional relations are learned first.Finally, the pragmatic principles of Herskovits (1986) are developed and are allied to minimally specified lexical entries in an analyses of in, on, at, over, under, above and below which incorporate functional relations

On the role of informativeness in spatial language comprehension

People need to know where objects are located in order to be able to interact with the world, and spatial language provides the main linguistic means of facilitating this. However, the information contained in the description about objects locations is not the only message conveyed; there is evidence in fact that people carry out inferences that go beyond the simple geometric relation specified (Coventry & Garrod, 2004; Tyler & Evans, 2003). People draw inferences about objects dynamic and objects interaction, and these information become critical for the apprehension of spatial language. Among the inferences people draw from spatial language the property of the converseness is particularly appealing; this principle states that given the description "A is above B" one can also infers "B is below A" (Leveit, 1984, 1996). Thus if the speaker says "the book is above the telephone" implicitly the listener also knows that the telephone is below the book. However this extra information does not necessary facilitate the apprehension of spatial descriptions. If it is true that inferences increase the amount of information the description conveys (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991), it is also true that this "extra-information" can be a disadvantage. In fact the spatial preposition used in the description can end up in being ambiguous because it suits more than one interpretation: The consequence is a reduction of the informativeness (Bar-Hillel, 1964). Tyler and Evans (2003) called this inferential process Best Fit. Speakers choose the spatial preposition which offers the best fit between the conceptual spatial relation and the speaker's communicative needs. This principle can be considered a logical extension of the notion of relevance (Grice. 1975; Sperber & Wilson, 1986) and an integration for the Q-Principle (Asher & Lascarides, 2003; Levinson, 2000a) according to which speakers have the duty to avoid statements that are informationally weaker than their knowledge of the world allows. This dissertation explores whether the inferences people draw on spatial representations, in particular those based on the converseness principle (Levelt, 1996), will affect the process that drive the speaker to choose the most informative description, that is the description that best fit spatial relations and speaker needs (Tyler & Evans, 2003). Experiment 1 and 2 study whether converseness, tested by manipulating the orientation of the located object, affects the extent to which a spatial description based on the preposition over, under, above, below is regarded as a good description of those scenes. Experiment 3 shows that the acceptability for a projective spatial preposition is affected by the orientation of both the object presented in the scene. Experiment 4 and 5 replicate the results achieved in the previous experiments using polyoriented objects (Leek, 1998b) in order to exclude the possibility that the decrease of acceptability was due to the fact that one object was shown in a non-canonical orientation. Experiment 6, 7 and 8 will provide evidence that converseness generates ambiguous descriptions also with spatial prepositions such as in front of, behind, on the left and to the right. Finally Experiment 9 and 10 show that for proximity terms such as near and far informativeness is not that relevant, but rather it seems that people simply use contextual information to set a scale for their judgments

Learning Functional Prepositions

In first language acquisition, what does it mean for a grammatical category to have been acquired, and what are the mechanisms by which children learn functional categories in general? In the context of prepositions (Ps), if the lexical/functional divide cuts through the P category, as has been suggested in the theoretical literature, then constructivist accounts of language acquisition would predict that children develop adult-like competence with the more abstract units, functional Ps, at a slower rate compared to their acquisition of lexical Ps. Nativists instead assume that the features of functional P are made available by Universal Grammar (UG), and are mapped as quickly, if not faster, than the semantic features of their lexical counterparts. Conversely, if Ps are either all lexical or all functional, on both accounts of acquisition we should observe few differences in learning. Three empirical studies of the development of P were conducted via computer analysis of the English and Spanish sub-corpora of the CHILDES database. Study 1 analyzed errors in child usage of Ps, finding almost no errors in commission in either language, but that the English learners lag in their production of functional Ps relative to lexical Ps. That no such delay was found in the Spanish data suggests that the English pattern is not universal. Studies 2 and 3 applied novel measures of phrasal (P head + nominal complement) productivity to the data. Study 2 examined prepositional phrases (PPs) whose head-complement pairs appeared in both child and adult speech, while Study 3 considered PPs produced by children that never occurred in adult speech. In both studies the productivity of Ps for English children developed faster than that of lexical Ps. In Spanish there were few differences, suggesting that children had already mastered both orders of Ps early in acquisition. These empirical results suggest that at least in English P is indeed a split category, and that children acquire the syntax of the functional subset very quickly, committing almost no errors. The UG position is thus supported. Next, the dissertation investigates a \u27soft nativist\u27 acquisition strategy that composes the distributional analysis of input, minimal a priori knowledge of the possible co-occurrence of morphosyntactic features associated with functional elements, and linguistic knowledge that is presumably acquired via the experience of pragmatic, communicative situations. The output of the analysis consists in a mapping of morphemes to the feature bundles of nominative pronouns for English and Spanish, plus specific claims about the sort of knowledge required from experience. The acquisition model is then extended to adpositions, to examine what, if anything, distributional analysis can tell us about the functional sequences of PPs. The results confirm the theoretical position according to which spatiotemporal Ps are lexical in character, rooting their own extended projections, and that functional Ps express an aspectual sequence in the functional superstructure of the PP

Spatial Representation of Topological Concepts IN and ON: A Comparative Study of English and Mandarin Chinese

This dissertational research is a crosslinguistic study of the semantic and conceptual underpinnings of two topological spatial concepts of containment (expressed in English mainly by preposition in) and support (expressed in English mainly by preposition on) in English and Mandarin Chinese. It consists of three studies, each presented as a stand alone paper in a chapter by itself. The first study experimentally examines the commonalities and variations between and within groups of English and Mandarin speakers in the categorization of a set of pictures into the containment and support relationship using terms. In addition to crosslinguistic similarities, systematic differences in the use of linguistic expressions by Mandarin and English speakers for these topological spatial relationships were found, as well as systematic individual differences within each language group. Together, these findings point to potential underlying differences in how speakers of English and Mandarin conceptualize these two topological spatial categories. The second study examines the role of the first language (Mandarin) in the use of the spatial meaning of prepositions in and on by Mandarin speaking users of L2 English. It was found that the L2 users had difficulty using these two prepositions in an English appropriate way and the difficulty was largely attributed to the interference of L1 linguistic and conceptual pattern. Furthermore, L2 proficiency, length of stay in L2 speaking country and exposure to L2 were not related to the use of the two prepositions. The third study is a descriptive study comparing the range of the semantic meanings of English prepositions in/on and Mandarin postpositions li/shang. Important similarities and differences in the linguistic encoding of containment and support between these two languages were identified. These differences can be accounted for by both semantic and conceptual factors. Most importantly, the study points out to the possibility of a continuum of spatial conceptualization, on which the differences between languages are reflected by the different places that they occupy on that continuum. All together, the findings in the three studies have important implications for both the research on semantics of spatial terms and on the conceptual structure of spatial relationships