Inside in and on: Typological and psycholinguistic perspectives.

Abstract

Although the use of a language{â}€™s spatial relational terms appears trivially simple to native speakers, the marked variability in how spatial terms map onto relations in the world (see, e.g., Levinson et al., 2003) hints at a deeper complexity of meaning. One approach to probing the meanings of spatial relational terms is to ask what aspects of a spatial relation people pay attention to when talking about the location of one object with respect to another. In this chapter, I apply a two-pronged approach to understanding spatial meaning, surveying evidence regarding the meanings of in- and on-terms from a cross-linguistic elicitation study and from a set of experiments focused on English. Taken together, the results suggest that humans attend to a complex set of interacting factors related to geometry, function, and qualitative physics when choosing spatial terms to describe relations in the world.