'Natural concepts' in the spatial topological domain--adpositional meanings in crosslinguistic perspective: An exercise in semantic typology

Attempts are made to verify the possibility by comparing the semantics of spatial adpositions in nine unrelated languages, with the help of standard elicitation procedure, thus producing a preliminary semantic typology of spatial adpositional systems. The language- specific spatial adposition meanings seems to emerge as compact subsets of underlying semantic space, with certain areas being statistical attractors or foci.