Factors relevant to the use of locative nouns in English

Abstract

One of the important issues of spatial language research is what factors influence the use of spatial terms. The article focuses on spatial terms such as 'position' and 'area' as important components of spatial language and explores if their production and comprehension are affected by the same general factors that work for the core spatial terms. It is shown that the locative nouns' usage patterns employ the same properties of spatial scenes - geometric and functional - but in a different way: 'position' refers to the topological aspect of space whereas 'area' refers to the meronymic aspect of space