Note that this week's meeting of the Fieldwork Group is cancelled.
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Psycholinguistics Group
Myrto Grigoroglou (faculty): "The ins and outs of spatial language."
Among the earliest learned spatial prepositions are Containment in/out and Support on/off. These prepositions denote both static locations ('places': be in/out of X) and dynamic motions (‘paths’: go in/out of X). In this presentation, I report and explain a previously unnoticed constraint on the use of out/off compared to in/on that cross-cuts the place/path distinction. In a series of elicited production experiments with English-speaking adults and three-year-olds, we show that, unlike in and on, out and off are used extremely sparsely to describe static locations but quite frequently to describe dynamic motions. We hypothesize that the reason for the asymmetry lies in the fact that place-denoting out/off are ‘negative’ locatives and as such have a restricted informational contribution without specific pragmatic support. We confirm this hypothesis in further production tasks with English speakers. We conclude that prepositional semantics and the place/path distinction conspire to produce subtle properties of spatial language.
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