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Through and Through: Corpus-Based Semantic Analysis of a Spatial Preposition (Short Paper)

Authors Brandon Bennett , Maria M. Hedblom

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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computing methodologies → Knowledge representation and reasoning
  • Computing methodologies → Natural language processing
  • Computing methodologies → Spatial and physical reasoning
Keywords
  • Preposition
  • Polysemy
  • Semantics
  • Spatial Relation
  • Ontology

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Abstract

We present a corpus-based analysis of sentences containing the highly polysemous word "through" and establish a framework for categorising sentence constituents in relation to this preposition. Using the annotated corpus, together with ideas from the fields of Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation, we specify a typology of figure, path-verb, and ground terms, characterised by the affordances they provide for participation in "through" relationships. We find that the mode of affordance provided by the ground is often ambiguous: many types of object can provide multiple modes of grounding for a "through" relationship, associated with different geometrical conditions between figure and ground. However, this ambiguity can be explained and often resolved or reduced by considering compatible combinations of figure and ground affordances in relation to the path.

Cite As Get BibTex

Brandon Bennett and Maria M. Hedblom. Through and Through: Corpus-Based Semantic Analysis of a Spatial Preposition (Short Paper). In 17th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 393, pp. 15:1-15:7, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2026.15

Author Details

Brandon Bennett
  • School of Computing, University of Leeds, UK
Maria M. Hedblom
  • Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Sweden
  • Department of Computing, Jönköping University, Sweden

References

  1. Brandon Bennett, Vinay Chaudhri, and Nikhil Dinesh. A vocabulary of topological and containment relations for a practical biological ontology. In John Stell, Thora Tenbrink, and Zena Wood, editors, Spatial Information Theory, 11th International Conference, COSIT 2013, LNCS, Scarborough, UK, 2013. Springer. URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_23.
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  4. Stefan Th. Gries. Polysemy. Cognitive linguistics: Key topics, pages 473-490, 2019. Google Scholar
  5. Maria M. Hedblom, Dagmar Gromann, and Oliver Kutz. In, Out and Through: Formalising some dynamic aspects of the image schema Containment. In Proc. 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pages 918-925, Pau, France, 2018. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3167132.3167233.
  6. Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis. Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English. Brown University Press, Providence, RI, 1967. Google Scholar
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  9. Leonard Talmy. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000. Google Scholar
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