This paper discusses spatial terms in Japanese. Common nouns such as ue “on/over/above” and naka “inside” are used in Japanese to represent spatial and temporal locations, as front in in front of, or center in in the center of in English. I consider Japanese common nouns that represent spatial locations to be relational nouns that are two-place predicates, one of whose argument slots is filled by the entity represented by the other NP in the NP1-no NP2 construction. Since the corpus data [1] suggest that spatial nouns are often semantically ambiguous among physical, metaphorical, and temporal locations, the unified semantic entry in the Generative Lexicon (GL) [2] proves to be useful for handling the semantic ambiguity.
Languages such as Chickasaw in North America use relational nouns to express locations [3], rather than prepositions such as in, on, under, or between as in English. In (1a), pakna’ “top” is a relational noun, that follows its possessor chokka’ “house.” Japanese is another language that expresses locations using relational nouns such as naka “inside,” ue “on/above,” and shita “under” as in (1b). (1) a. chokka’ pakna’ house top “the top of the house (the house’s roof)” b. mune-no mae-de tenohira-o awase (4179) chest-GEN front-LOC palms-ACC hold “Put your palms together in front of your chest”
Mae “front” is a relational noun that does not stand alone semantically; therefore,
it always means “the front of something,” for example, musuko which means “son”
always stands for “someone’s son” (e.g., “Bill’s son”). Naka “inside,” ue “on/above,”
and shita “under” are two-place holders, and nouns such as aida “between” that require
another argument are three-place predicates.
1 The numbers in parentheses indicate the sentence IDs of the output of the data in the Yahoo!
Chiebukuro section of [
Ambiguity among Physical, Metaphorical and Temporal Locations
Modeling Lexical Ambiguity of Spatial Language
Formal Semantics This section formalizes the spatial terms in Japanese. Most of them are two-place holders except aida “between” which is a three-place predicate. (4) a. [[mae]] = l x,y[in-front-of(x)(y)]
b. [[mae]] = l t,t’[before(t)(t’)] (5) a. [[mune − no mae“in f ront o f the chest”]] = l y.in-front-of(e x.chest(x))(y) b. [[shuppatsu − no mae“be f ore departure”]]
= l e’.∃e[before(time(e))(time(e’))&departure(e)] (6) a. [[ho]] = l x,y[toward(x)(y)]
b. [[ho]] = l x,y[to(x)(y)] (7) a. [[(physical)naka]] = l x,y.in(x)(y)
b. [[(metaphorical)naka]] = l x,y.among(x)(y) (8) a. [[nabe − no naka“inside the pot”]] = l y.in(e x.pot(x))(y)
b. [[reshipi − no naka“amongrecipes′′]] = l y.among(e x.recipe(x))(y) (9) a. [[aida]] = l x,y,z[between(x)(y)(z)] b. [[aida]] = l x,y,z[among(x)(y)(z)] c. [[aida]] = l t,t’[t’= during(t)] (10) a. Ha-to ha-no aida atari-ga chairoku naru-no-desu-ka. (2906) tooth-and tooth-GEN between vicinity-NOM brown become-GEN-HON-Q “Have the gaps between your teeth turned brown?” b. Geinojin-no aida-de hayat-teiru daietto-shokuhin (427) entertainer-GEN among-LOC popular-PROG diet-food “The diet food popular among TV entertainers” c. Koko sukagetsu-no aida (3201) this a few months-GEN period “during these few months” 3.2
Lexical Ambiguity in the Generative Lexicon Contrary to the previous section which listed two-way or three-way ambiguous lexical entries, the GL [2] has the means to provide unified lexical entries for a single spatial term, due to its elaborate lexical semantic information. In particular, the Lexical Conceptual Paradigm (LCP) [4, 2] is a powerful tool for resolving semantic ambiguity.
The formal quale in GL contains ontological information. In (11), coffee is a drink according to its formal quale, and its higher ontological category is a physical entity, which implies that ue “on” is interpreted physically. The unification profess is described in the following manner: (11) COFFEE ARG1 = x DRINK ARGSTR = D-ARG1 = y HUMAN D-E1 = e1 PROCESS FORMAL = LIQUID( x ) QUALIA = TELIC = DRINK ACT( e1 , y , x ) UE “ON” KOHI-NO UE “ON COFFEE”
ARG1 = x PHYSICAL OBJECT AQURGASLTIAR== [FAORRGM2A=Ly=POHNY(SIeC1AxL, OxB,JEyCT)]AQURGASLTIAR==
D-E1 = e1 STATE
ARG1 = x PHYSICAL OBJECT ARG2 = y COFFEE D-E1 = e1 STATE [FORMAL = ON( e1 , x , y )]
Mae “in front/before” is lexically ambiguous between physical and temporal locations. Lexical ambiguity calls for a meta-entry, that is, the LCP, which is a Cartesian product of the different concepts represented by a single lexical item [2, 5] as in (12). For example, book is a Cartesian product of a physical entity and the information contained within it, thus, (13a,b) are both grammatically correct. (12) mae.lcp = {location.time, location, time } (13) a. The book is on the table.
b. That book was right. An earthquake did happen as it had predicted. (14) MAE “AQIURNGAFSLRTIOARNT==OF CHEST”
Argument structure also needs to have metaentries since mae “front/before” and
aida “between/among/during” combine with different types of semantic arguments.
4 Conclusion
In this paper, spatial language in the form of “NP1-GEN NP2” constructions in Japanese
was taken from [