La repr\'esentation formelle des concepts spatiaux dans la langue

TL;DR

This paper develops a formal system to analyze and represent the semantic content of spatial expressions in French, revealing fundamental properties of conceptual space through linguistic analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel formal framework for representing spatial concepts and relations in French, integrating semantic analysis with formal modeling.

Findings

The formal system accurately models the semantics of French spatial prepositions.

The approach reveals key properties of spatial concepts in language.

The representations are inferentially adequate for linguistic analysis.

Abstract

In this chapter, we assume that systematically studying spatial markers semantics in language provides a means to reveal fundamental properties and concepts characterizing conceptual representations of space. We propose a formal system accounting for the properties highlighted by the linguistic analysis, and we use these tools for representing the semantic content of several spatial relations of French. The first part presents a semantic analysis of the expression of space in French aiming at describing the constraints that formal representations have to take into account. In the second part, after presenting the structure of our formal system, we set out its components. A commonsense geometry is sketched out and several functional and pragmatic spatial concepts are formalized. We take a special attention in showing that these concepts are well suited to representing the semantic content of several prepositions of French ('sur' (on), 'dans' (in), 'devant' (in front of), 'au-dessus' (above)), and in illustrating the inferential adequacy of these representations.