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Abstract of The Dissertation

The dissertation provides a semantic analysis of locative prepositional phrases in English. It identifies the possible interpretations of locative PPs and builds a general logic to account for the semantics of spatial expressions. The analysis introduces space as a new ontological domain and models the structural properties of spatial entities like regions, paths, and orientations. It develops a formal semantic framework and analyzes locative PPs as denoting special functions from relations to relations. The dissertation also builds a logic for locative expressions based on the mereology of space and defines concepts like paths and orientations. It applies this framework to discuss concepts involved in locative PP semantics, like symmetry and perspective.

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84 views1 page

Abstract of The Dissertation

The dissertation provides a semantic analysis of locative prepositional phrases in English. It identifies the possible interpretations of locative PPs and builds a general logic to account for the semantics of spatial expressions. The analysis introduces space as a new ontological domain and models the structural properties of spatial entities like regions, paths, and orientations. It develops a formal semantic framework and analyzes locative PPs as denoting special functions from relations to relations. The dissertation also builds a logic for locative expressions based on the mereology of space and defines concepts like paths and orientations. It applies this framework to discuss concepts involved in locative PP semantics, like symmetry and perspective.

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Marialucia Sato
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ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Semantics of Locative Prepositional Phrases in English by Seungho Nam Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics University

of California, Los Angeles, 1995 Professor Edward L. Keenan, Chair The dissertation provides a semantic analysis of locative prepositional phrases in English. The goal of the dissertation is two-fold: (i) To identify the denotational constraints on the possible interpretations of locative PPs; and (ii) to build up the general logic for the semantics of spatial expressions which can account for various semantic facts involved in the spatial expressions. In addition to the lexical semantics of locative prepositions, our analysis identifies the primitive notions for the logic of space and the ways that natural language structures space, and further we account for the semantic relations among spatial expressions (e.g., entailment, ambiguity). The dissertation introduces the space as a new ontological domain and illustrates that the structural properties/relations among the spatial entities (regions, paths, and orientations) are much more intricate than those of the temporal ones. This dissertation adopts the framework of modeltheoretic semantics, and our interest in the denotational semantics of locative PPs naturally calls for the precise formal methods developed in Generalized Quantifier Theory and (boolean) algebraic semantics. Chapter 2 investigates the kind of semantic objects English locative PPs denote. We note that there are two semantic analyses of the locative PPs and give a unified semantics of the two: (i) Locative PPs as predicate modifiers, and (ii) locative prepositions as predicate extensors. We show that locative PPs denote in a special subset of the functions from n-ary relations into n-ary relations, which we identify as intersective functions. The intersectivity constraint derives from the intuition that locative PPs are extensional and so argument-oriented. Chapter 3 builds up the general logic for the semantics of locative expressions, based on the mereology of the space ( ) and the primitive concept region. The space is defined as the set of regions with three primitive relations among them, the part-to-whole relation (), the betweenness relation, and the relative distance relation. In terms of these primitives, we define paths and orientations, and postulate Path structure and Orientation structure: the former for movementdirectional interpretations, and the latter for stative-locational interpretations. Chapter 4 illustrates the linguistic applications of the formal apparatus developed in chapter 3, and discusses two concepts, symmetry and locative perspective, involved in the semantics of locative PPs. In addition to the lexical semantics of locative prepositions classified into four natural subclasses: topological invariants, symmetric, orientational, and directional locatives we identify two special types of paths determined by locatives: symmetric paths and homogeneous paths. Finally we provide the semantics of perspectival interpretation of locative PPs in terms of binary preposition and deictic orientation.

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