The Ins and Outs of spatial language: Pragmatics shapes early-developing, cross-linguistically robust encoding patterns
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on the language of space has uncovered a complex set of conceptual and linguistic factors affecting the nature, use and acquisition of spatial vocabularies across languages. Here we highlight the important but understudied role of pragmatic factors in how spatial relations are encoded across ages and languages. We focus on Containment ( in/out ) and Support ( on/off ) terms that can denote both static locations (‘places’: be in/out of X ) and dynamic motions (‘paths’: go in/out of X ). We offer a new pragmatic analysis of place-denoting out/off as ‘negative’ locatives and, as a result, predict that such expressions should have a restricted informational contribution (and use) compared to in/on . This prediction is confirmed in four experiments. In elicited production tasks with English-speaking adults and three-year-olds, out and off (unlike in and on ) are used extremely sparsely to describe static locations (Experiment 1) but quite frequently to describe dynamic motions (Experiment 2). When contextual support is present, the use of place-denoting out/off increases (Experiment 3). Similar patterns in the use of locatives are found in French, Greek and Turkish speakers (Experiment 4). We conclude that pragmatic factors produce striking, early emerging and cross-linguistically stable properties of spatial vocabulary.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it