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When people talk about kinship systems, they often use co‐speech gestures and other representations to elaborate. This paper investigates such polysemiotic (spoken, gestured, and drawn) descriptions of kinship relations, to see if they display recurring patterns of conventionalization that capture specific social structures. We present an exploratory hypothesis‐generating study of descriptions produced by a lesser‐known ethnolinguistic community to the cognitive sciences: the Paamese people of Vanuatu. Forty Paamese speakers were asked to talk about their family in semi‐guided kinship interviews. Analyses of the speech, gesture, and drawings produced during these interviews revealed that lineality (i.e., mother's side vs. father's side) is lateralized in the speaker's gesture space. In other words, kinship members of the speaker's matriline are placed on the left side of the speaker's body and those of the patriline are placed on their right side, when they are mentioned in speech. Moreover, we find that the gesture produced by Paamese participants during verbal descriptions of marital relations are performed significantly more often on two diagonal directions of the sagittal axis. We show that these diagonals are also found in the few diagrams that participants drew on the ground to augment their verbo‐gestural descriptions of marriage practices with drawing. We interpret this behavior as evidence of a spatial template, which Paamese speakers activate to think and communicate about family relations. We therefore argue that extending investigations of kinship structures beyond kinship terminologies alone can unveil additional key factors that shape kinship cognition and communication and hereby provide further insights into the diversity of social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Administrative geography is concerned with the hierarchy of areas related to national and local government in a country. They form an important dataset in the country's open data provision and act as the geo-referencing backdrop for many types of geospatial data. Proprietary ontologies are built to model and represent these data with little focus on spatial semantics. Studying the quality of these ontologies and developing methods for their evaluation are needed. This paper addresses these problems by studying the spatial semantics of administrative geography data and proposes a uniform set of qualitative semantics that encapsulates the inherent spatial structure of the administrative divisions and allows for the application of spatial reasoning. Topological and proximity semantics are defined and combined into a single measure of spatial completeness and used for defining a set of competency questions to be used in the evaluation process. The significance of the novel measure of completeness and competency questions is demonstrated on four prominent real world administrative geography ontologies. It is shown how these can provide an objective measure of quality of the geospatial ontologies and gaps in their definition. The proposed approach to defining spatial completeness complements the established methods in the literature, that primarily focus on the syntactical and structural dimensions of the ontologies, and offers a novel approach to ontology evaluation in the geospatial domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic 3D city models have been widely used in computer graphics, geomatics, planning, construction, and urban simulation. While traditional geometric models are used only for visualization purposes, semantic 3D city models contain abundant detailed information, such as location, classification, and functional aspects. Such semantics can facilitate a better interpretation of the built environment by computers. However, the current semantic 3D city models are mostly specific to particular city object types and features, with unclear spatial semantics, which limits their broader applications. This study, therefore, proposes a novel framework called OSMsc, where OSM refers to OpenStreetMap and sc refers to semantic city. The OSMsc framework considers OSM as the primary data source to construct city objects within the specified study area, construct semantic connectors, enrich spatial semantics, and generate the CityJSON-formatted model. The case studies demonstrate that semantic 3D city models constructed by OSMsc are free from geometric and semantic errors, applicable to any city worldwide, and have potential for urban studies, such as urban morphology and urban microclimate analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional spatial enabled grammars lack flexibility in specifying the spatial semantics of graphs. This paper describes a new graph grammar formalism called the multigranularity Coordinate Graph Grammar (mgCGG) for spatial graphs. Based on the Coordinate Graph Grammar (CGG), the mgCGG divides coordinates into two categories, physical coordinates and grammatical coordinates, where physical coordinates are the common coordinates in the real world, and grammatical coordinates describe the restrictions on the spatial semantics. In the derivation and reduction of the mgCGG, the spatial matching conditions between nodes are evaluated on the basis of the grammatical coordinates, which can be obtained by the specified granularities. By adjusting the granularities, both qualitative and quantitative analyses for spatial semantics can be obtained, including the transition states between them. In addition, a new redex searching algorithm with polynomial time complexity is designed for the mgCGG. A running example of drawing a flowchart is given to illustrate a practical application of the mgCGG. Through a detailed comparison with related spatial-enabled grammars, it is found that the mgCGG has good performance in four critical aspects—the semantics processing mechanism, fault-tolerance, redex searching algorithm, and practical application—providing a flexible yet uniform way to specify spatial graphs and building a bridge between nonspatial and spatial grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aerial scene classification can be treated as the problem of acquiring high-level semantic interpretations of the earth-surface images, remotely captured from the space or from the aerial vehicles. Although the topic is already extensively explored thus far, due to the high complexities and diversities in geometrical and spatial texture of aerial scenes, there still remain several open challenges. This paper primarily focuses on a comparatively new challenge of aerial scene classification under labelled sample scarcity, which restricts the promising deep network models, such as convolutional neural networks, to attain the desired accuracy. Even the graph convolutional networks, which have added strength of capturing spatial relationships, fail to perform well when trained with limited training samples. We address this issue by generating hierarchical semantics-driven multiple graph representations for each image, and subsequently, employing graph representation learning over these multitude of graphs which act as augmented training samples. Our graph-based hierarchical semantics-driven model (GrapHiSM) is evaluated using benchmark UC-Merced and AID datasets. Experimental results exhibit efficacy of GrapHiSM, in handling labelled sample scarcity at the time of aerial scene classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the spatial semantics of Yakutsk’s urban text (Sakha/Yakutia, Russia) as a component of the cultural landscape. The research is based on the theoretical approaches of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, scholarly traditions of post-Soviet cultural (or the so-called “humanitarian”) geography, and modern critical studies of toponymy. The authors analyze spatial semantics and controversial elements of political and cultural symbolism of the urban text, which combines indigenous Yakut, Russian, and Soviet cultural components. With more than four hundred toponymic examples, this case study reveals the semiotic structure of Yakutsk toponymic system as a combination of urbanscape symbolization processes. For the first time, the article empirically shows, with the help of toponymy in the space of a post-Soviet city, the relationship, interaction, and positioning of the three cultures. In addition, the semantics of toponyms is typologized, which allows to quantitatively, qualitatively, and cartographically describe the process of “writing” the urban text.

The article studies the spatial semantics of Yakutsk's urban text (Sakha/Yakutia, Russia) as a component of the cultural landscape. The research is based on the theoretical approaches of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics, scholarly traditions of post-Soviet cultural (or the so-called "humanitarian") geography, and modern critical studies of toponymy. The authors analyze spatial semantics and controversial elements of political and cultural symbolism of the urban text, which combines indigenous Yakut, Russian, and Soviet cultural components. With more than four hundred toponymic examples, this case study reveals the semiotic structure of Yakutsk toponymic system as a combination of urbanscape symbolization processes. For the first time the article empirically shows, with the help of toponymy in the space of a post-Soviet city, the relationship, interaction, and positioning of the three cultures. In addition, the semantics of toponyms is typologized, which allows to quantitatively, qualitatively, and cartographically describe the process of "writing" the urban text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semantics of spatial terms has attracted substantialattention in the cognitive sciences, revealing both compellingsimilarities and striking differences across languages.However, much of the evidence regarding cross-linguisticvariation pertains to fine-grained comparisons betweenindividual lexical items, while cross-linguistic similarities arefound in more coarse-grained studies of the conceptual spaceunderlying semantic systems. We seek to bridge this gap,moving beyond the semantics of individual terms to ask whatthe comparison of spatial semantic systems may reveal aboutthe conceptualization of locations in English and MandarinChinese and about the nature of potential universals in thisdomain. We subjected descriptions of 116 spatial scenes tomultidimensional scaling analyses in order to reveal thestructures of the underlying conceptual spaces in eachlanguage. In addition to revealing overlaps and divergences inthe conceptualization of space in English and Mandarin, ourresults suggest a difference in complexity, whereby Mandarinterms are accommodated by a lower-dimensional similarityspace than are English terms.

Abstract Cultural heritage (CH) reflects on the history of a society and its traditions and it is treated as the nation’s memory and identity. Digitizing and web, beside its benefits, brought some challenges in disseminating and retrieving CH information, which has heterogeneous content varying widely in type and properties yet encompassing rich semantic links. Semantic web technologies, especially ontologies, provide a common understanding inside a domain that helps sharing knowledge and interoperability. They can be very helpful in data modeling for a better information retrieval compared to relational databases as they take into account the semantics of information, guarantee reusability, and make information machine-readable that can offer more flexibility to intelligent services and applications. CH community is one of the first domains to make use semantic web technologies to deal with this issue. CIDOC CRM is the most used and famous ontology in CH domain, which is an ISO standard since 2006. Heritage sites are composed of many points of interest that attract visitors to find out about them. However, information about a particular POI is complex and interconnected with other people, events, and objects. In this paper, we aim to develop a POI-based data model for heritage sites in Iran using concepts from CIDOC CRM integrated with GeoSPARQL, the standard ontology in geospatial field, to incorporate spatial semantics with heritage information. This way the user can freely explore their preferred information about the places they desire. This can make it possible to use the data model for location-based services and applications in heritage sites.

The use of object-like expressions to encode an extension in space, along which a movement is performed, is generally widespread in Saami as a whole. In this article, the term PATH refers to such extensions in space. The study deals specifically with the use of the accusative singular to encode PATH in South Saami. One of the aims of the study is to investigate the semantic properties of nouns that, inflected for the accusative singular, appear in expressions of PATH. Another aim is to examine how such nouns semantically and syntactically interact with spatial adverbs to encode PATH, and how these adverbs relate to adpositions. In addition, the article directs attention to the semantic and syntactic properties of verbs which appear in clauses where nouns inflected for the accusative singular encode PATH. This short study is based on a quite limited sample and aims merely to highlight features of this phenomenon, which merit future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Hessische Blätter für Volksbildung is the property of wbv Media GmbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

• We uncover an asymmetry in the use of English positive and negative containment and support terms (in/on vs. out/off). • Children and adults use out / off rarely to describe static locations but frequently to describe dynamic motions. • However, when contextual support is present, the use of out/off increases. • The restricted distribution of out / off is a pragmatic consequence of their negative semantics. • Similar patterns are observed in the use of containment and support locatives by French, Greek and Turkish speakers. Research on the language of space has uncovered a complex set of conceptual and linguistic factors affecting the nature, use and acquisition of spatial vocabularies across languages. Here we highlight the important but understudied role of pragmatic factors in how spatial relations are encoded across ages and languages. We focus on Containment (in/out) and Support (on/off) terms that can denote both static locations ('places': be in/out of X) and dynamic motions ('paths': go in/out of X). We offer a new pragmatic analysis of place-denoting out/off as 'negative' locatives and, as a result, predict that such expressions should have a restricted informational contribution (and use) compared to in/on. This prediction is confirmed in four experiments. In elicited production tasks with English-speaking adults and three-year-olds, out and off (unlike in and on) are used extremely sparsely to describe static locations (Experiment 1) but quite frequently to describe dynamic motions (Experiment 2). When contextual support is present, the use of place-denoting out/off increases (Experiment 3). Similar patterns in the use of locatives are found in French, Greek and Turkish speakers (Experiment 4). We conclude that pragmatic factors produce striking, early emerging and cross-linguistically stable properties of spatial vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates possible explanations for the sudden diffusion of the French expression à travers, meaning ‘(way) through/across’, from the middle of the 18th century onwards. From that moment, à travers became remarkably more used than the similar expression au travers (de), and also relatively more frequent in comparison with par, ‘through’, a preposition with which it competes in certain contexts. A first hypothesis supposes a competition with par. A second assumption is linked to the end of the freedom of à travers and au travers with respect to the combination with the preposition de. The results indicate that the rise of the frequencies of à travers (de) could, in part, follow from a competition with par for the combination with certain types of Grounds (the reference entity of a spatial relation). The increased level of bondedness – and thus of grammaticalization – of à travers seems also to have contributed to its diffusion.

Cultural heritage (CH) reflects on the history of a society and its traditions and it is treated as the nation's memory and identity. Digitizing and web, beside its benefits, brought some challenges in disseminating and retrieving CH information, which has heterogeneous content varying widely in type and properties yet encompassing rich semantic links. Semantic web technologies, especially ontologies, provide a common understanding inside a domain that helps sharing knowledge and interoperability. They can be very helpful in data modeling for a better information retrieval compared to relational databases as they take into account the semantics of information, guarantee reusability, and make information machine-readable that can offer more flexibility to intelligent services and applications. CH community is one of the first domains to make use semantic web technologies to deal with this issue. CIDOC CRM is the most used and famous ontology in CH domain, which is an ISO standard since 2006. Heritage sites are composed of many points of interest that attract visitors to find out about them. However, information about a particular POI is complex and interconnected with other people, events, and objects. In this paper, we aim to develop a POI-based data model for heritage sites in Iran using concepts from CIDOC CRM integrated with GeoSPARQL, the standard ontology in geospatial field, to incorporate spatial semantics with heritage information. This way the user can freely explore their preferred information about the places they desire. This can make it possible to use the data model for location-based services and applications in heritage sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Turkish Studies - Language & Literature is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Diyalog Interkulturelle Zeitschrift für Germanistik is the property of Diyalog Interkulturelle Zeitschrift fur Germanistik and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The questions of the topological semantics of natural language are discussed in the article/ The need to study the topological semantics is due to the change of the quality of the human environment and change the status of the language. Language in digital society is matched with technology. The basic concept of the topological semantics of natural language is recognized, according to the L. Wittgenstein’ philosophy on the sentence as a propositional sign, modeling and representing the world of facts. Logical basis of the topological semantics is derived from epistemic logic, in which the source concept relies on the notion of frame, motivating the emergence of the topological concept of ‘the scene’. Analyzes the concept of topological semantics developed by different authors and based on an understanding of language as a technology. With its origins in topological semantics is being built to a spatial semiotics, founded by Y. M. Lotman.

The 'Western Balkans' is examined as a policy concept of social relations. The starting point in the interpretation is that this name used for the region is not really a scientific and neutral geographical name rather a name of which introduction was determined by geopolitical factors. Using the name of Western Balkans does not refer to a geographical unit but conveys a judgement: countries which have not yet reached the level of democracy and culture required by the EU. Whether using this term or rejecting it, makes a division in scientific discourse sharper than usual but illustrates well the creation of conceptual framework for thinking about the reality surrounding us. The article makes an attempt to show the different layers of this "West Balkan" seen by an external observer, describing how value structures and interest networks determine them in the beginning of the 21st century. The discursive analysis of the geopolitical context is based on the poststructuralist monograph of Predrag Svilar, his discursive critique about "Western Balkans" but the examination here does not stop at the moral findings of value-led "critical schools". Only sensitive diagnosis is kept from the normative approach of these schools. Limits of the geopolitical and scientific battles on the westernisation of the Balkans are shown by the critique of the critical geopolitics - approaching it from spatial semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observers often forego using highly-valid spatial cues to guide attention when they can locate the target more easily without the cue. This evidence suggests that effortful cognitive control processes – specifically, spatial reference frame computations that underlie the comprehension of directional words – are invoked sparingly in symbolic spatial cueing tasks. The present study examined the extent to which observers would adopt a default strategy of full or only partial spatial word cue comprehension to exploit the percentage of trials in which disambiguation of opposing stimuli along the cued axis was mandatory in order to respond. The main results revealed that observers routinely processed directional information when it was frequently needed (on 95% of trials), while selectively processing directional information when it was seldom needed (on 5% of trials), presumably to exploit the extreme context manipulation and minimize the amount of cognitive demand incurred. Hence, target-distractor relationships can be harnessed to mediate cognitive control exertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban functional regions are essential information in parsing urban spatial structure. The rapid and accurate identification of urban functional regions is important for improving urban planning and management. Thanks to its low cost and fast data update characteristics, the Point of Interest (POI) is one of the most common types of open access data. It mainly identifies urban functional regions by analyzing the potential correlation between POI data and the regions. Even though this is an important manifestation of the functional region, the spatial correlation between regions is rarely considered in previous studies. In order to extract the spatial semantic information among regions, a new model, called the Block2vec, is proposed by using the idea of the Skip-gram framework. The Block2vec model maps the spatial correlation between the POIs, as well as the regions, to a high-dimensional vector, in which classification of urban functional regions can be better performed. The results from cluster analysis showed that the high-dimensional vector extracted can well distinguish the regions with different functions. The random forests classification result (Overall accuracy = 0.7186, Kappa = 0.6429) illustrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. This study also verified the potential of the sentence embedding model in the semantic information extraction of POIs.

The International Conference on Interoperating Geographic Information Systems (Santa Barbara December 3-4, 1997) was followed by an invitational Workshop (December 5-6). The conference reviewed the current state of research in related disciplines concerning the technical, semantic, and organizational issues of GIS interoperation; considered case studies of GIS interoperation; and explored theoretical frameworks for interoperation and evaluations of alternative approaches. This document presents the full program of extended abstracts.  The conference was part of the Varenius Project's research initiative on Interoperating GIS.

A major research topic in geographic databases is that of interoperability, i.e., the capability to access transparently remote data and processes in an open environment. This paper addresses the issue of information modeling for interoperating geographic databases. In particular, it deals with the topic of exchanging semantics at the information systems context. Our proposal is based on the peculiarities of spatial data, namely field- and object-based views of space and spatial relationships, that are critical for the representation of information in an interoperable environment. A generic Geographic Data Model that encapsulates these semantics and makes their interchange among remote systems possible and without ambiguities, is proposed. We show with an example how this model supports interaction among heterogeneous spatial application domains. This research effort is based on (a) the requirements expressed by the OpenGIS community, (b) results from modeling “classical” interoperable applications, and (c) a well-established theory on database modeling of geographic applications.

Queries in spatial databases, such as GIS, image databases, or CAD/CAM systems, are often based on the relationships among spatial objects. The incorporation of spatial relationships over spatial domain into the syntax of a spatial query language is an essential extension beyond power of the traditional query languages. To help clarify the users' diverse understandings about the semantics of spatial relations and enable the processing of spatial queries it is proposed to formally describe the relationships.

Highlights • A novel blind image quality assessment is proposed. • The proposed method evaluates distorted image from a completely new perspective of human subjective perception. • The experiment results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. Abstract No-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) aims to evaluate the quality of an image without reference image, which is greatly desired in the automatic visual signal processing system. Distortions degrade the visual contents and affect the semantics acquisition during the process of human perception. Although the existing methods evaluate the quality of images based on the structure, texture, or statistical characteristics, and deliver high quality prediction accuracy, they do not take the spatial semantics into account. From the perspective of human perception, distortions decrease the structural semantics that represent the structural information, and disturb the spatial semantics that describe the contents of images. Therefore, we attempt to measure the image quality by its degradation of semantics in an image. To extract the semantics of an image, a semantic network is proposed. The network contains convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) that correspond to structural semantics and spatial semantics, respectively. CNN can be regarded as a coarse imitation of human visual mechanism to obtain the structural information, and LSTM can express the contents of an image. Then, by measuring the degradations of different semantics on images, a novel NR IQA is introduced. The proposed approach is evaluated on the databases of LIVE, CSIQ, TID2013, and LIVE multiply distorted database as well as LIVE in the wild image quality challenge database, and the results show superior performance to other state-of-the-art NR IQA methods. Furthermore, we explore the generalization capability of the proposed approach, and the experimental results indicate the proposed approach has a high robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a cross-linguistic investigation of a constraint on the use on intrinsic frames of reference proposed by Levelt (1984, 1996). This proposed constraint claims that use of intrinsic frames when the ground object is in non-canonical position is blocked due to conflict with gravitational-based reference frames. Regression models of the data from Arabic, K'iche', Spanish, Yucatec, and Zapotec suggest that this constraint is valid across languages. However, the strength at which the constraint operates is predicted by the frequency of canonical intrinsic frames in the particular language. The ratio of the incidence of intrinsic usage with canonical vs. non-canonical orientation appears to be remarkably uniform across languages, which suggests the possibility of a strong cognitive universal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of linguistic elements prototypically associated with physical space to refer to time constitutes a reflection of the conceptual metaphor TIME IS SPACE. The present paper examines and categorizes the different manifestations of this phenomenon in Spanish. The inquiry covers the temporal use of words that prototypically mark the dimensionality of concrete referents, the transfer of deictic elements from the spatial to the temporal domain, the expression of time units as if they formed a sequence of objects and the conceptualization of time as movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a methodology based on the semantic processing of geographic objects for the classification of soils according to the New Version of Genetic Classification of soils of Cuba. The method consists of five stages: conceptualization, synthesis, queries processing, retrieval and management. The result is a system of geospatial information management applying semantic similarity measure of Resnik. As a case study considering the region of San Jose de las Lajas located in the province of Mayabeque.

Meteorological time series prediction plays a significant role in short-term and long-term decision making in various disciplines. However, it is a challenging task involving several issues. Sometimes, the available domain knowledge may help in dealing with certain issues in this regard. This work proposes a multivariate prediction approach based on a variant of semantic Bayesian network , termed as semBnet . The key objective of semBnet is to incorporate the spatial semantics as a form of domain knowledge, in standard/classical Bayesian network (SBN), and thereby improving the accuracy of meteorological prediction. It has been shown that compared to SBN, the proposed semBnet is less prone to parameter value uncertainty. Empirical studies on multivariate prediction of Temperature, Humidity, Rainfall and Soil moisture demonstrate the superiority of proposed approach over linear statistical models (e.g. ARIMA, spatio-temporal ordinary kriging (ST-OK)), and non-linear prediction techniques based on ANN, SBN, hierarchical Bayesian autoregressive model (HBAR) etc. Most significantly, compared to SBN, the proposed semBnet shows average 24% improvement in mean absolute percentage error of prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial structures of cities have changed dramatically with rapid socio-economic development in ways that are not well understood. To support urban structural analysis and rational planning, we propose a framework to identify urban functional regions and quantitatively explore the intensity of the interactions between them, thus increasing the understanding of urban structures. A method for the identification of functional regions via spatial semantics is proposed, which involves two steps: (1) the study area is classified into three types of functional regions using taxi origin/destination (O/D) flows; and (2) the spatial semantics for the three types of functional regions are demonstrated based on point-of-interest (POI) categories. To validate the existence of urban functional regions, we explored the intensity of interactions quantitatively between them. A case study using POI data and taxi trajectory data from Beijing validates the proposed framework. The results show that the proposed framework can be used to identify urban functional regions and promotes an enhanced understanding of urban structures.

The present paper aims at showing that ‘cognitive reference points’ (CRPs, see Rosch [1975] and Langacker [1999]) have a crucial role in construing the meaning of a significant group of Hungarian folksongs. In line with the dynamic view on construal, according to which conceptualization unfolds through processing time, the paper argues that building up conceptions via CRPs and their larger configurations outline a mental path, representing a metaphorical emotional approach. The development of the physical route as mental route evolves in a gradual transfer from Perceptual space to Non-actual space, where a salient entity has a ‘gate’ function between mental spaces. Some notions such as ‘mental simulation’ (Langacker 1999), ‘abstract motion’ (Matlock 2010), ‘fictive motion’ (Talmy 2000), or ‘subjective motion’ (Langacker 1987; Matsumoto 1996; Brandt 2009) apply to this specific pattern of construal, namely, motion or change experienced by the conceptualizer along his attention path, which manifests here in different forms of subjectivity. The ordering and directionality of CRPs, along with the metaphorical implications of each entity serving as reference points, thus have important semantic relevance and forms an essential component of meaning construal in this lyrical text type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Cubana de Ciencias Informáticas is the property of Universidad de las Ciencias Informaticas (UCI) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In their concrete spatial uses, the French verbs replacer “replace, put back” and déplacer “displace, move away” illustrate two different instanciations of the name place, on which they are based. Replacer is a verb of motion, which closely follows the semantic specificity of the name in question, namely its tendency to ‘substantially localize’. For instance, replacer X stands for a process with a final aspectual and locative polarity, which amounts to describing a change of place for the substance X. For the verb déplacer, the change of location also affects a substance, but it does not have to be a change of place in a restrictive sense, and neither is it linked to a specific aspectual or locative polarity. The aim of this study is to find an explanation for the differences in semantic behavior between these two verbs.

Ernest Davis' article “Qualititative Spatial Reasoning in Interpreting Text and Narrative” discusses challenges that the interpretation of natural language appears to raise for the formalization of commonsense spatial reasoning. Davis finds these to be of “surprising logical complexity,” but also “erratic” in that they do not show a logical structuring of the problem space that could guide productive research. In this response I argue that much of the apparent lack of structure Davis laments is due to the very style of formal modeling he pursues. By augmenting logical considerations with substantial input from other disciplines and by adopting a heterogeneous and modular approach to formalization, I suggest that the problem space is by no means as ill-structured as Davis presents it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]