D. Mark and M. Egenhofer
Topology of Prototypical Spatial Relations Between Lines and Regions in English and Spanish

Abstract

Thirty-two native-speakers of English drew examples of roads that fit the spatial relations to a park, as indicated in 64 English-language sentence. Also, 19 native speakers of Spanish drew examples for 43 Spanish-language sentences. Then, each of the 2856 drawings (2044 English and 812 Spanish) was classified according to the road-park spatial relation into one of 19 categories of spatial relations defined by the 9-intersection model. For each of the 107 sentences, the proportion of subjects drawing each relation was determined. These counts indicate the prototypical spatial relations corresponding to each sentence. Results confirm our previous work on prototypical spatial relations: 2522 of the 2856 drawings (88 percent) fell into just 5 spatial relations, roughly equivalent to inside, outside (disjoint), enters, crosses, and goes to. Evidently, there are many ways in English and Spanish to express relations approximately corresponding to the English inside, outside, enter, cross, and goes-to, and relatively few verbally compact ways to express other spatial relations between roads and parks, perhaps lines and regions in general. The topological results suggest that English and Spanish are very similar in the ways they express road-park spatial relations in English and Spanish. Several Spanish-English pairs of sentences with similar common-sense meanings also had very similar profiles of response across the 19 spatial relation categories. Future work will examine the geometry of the examples drawn by the subjects in this experiment, and will examine other languages.