The Semantics of Stative Locative Events in Vietnamese: A Spatial Exploration
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1407.25Keywords:
stative locatives, bijective events, surjective events, figure and ground, formal semanticsAbstract
This study utilizes mathematical formalism and Figure-Ground argument mapping to categorize stative locative events in Vietnamese as surjective or bijective. Bijective events exhibit a one-to-one mapping of Figures and Grounds, while surjectives allow a single Figure to map onto multiple Grounds. Through analysis of Vietnamese sentences, the paper demonstrates how bijective and surjective locatives encode deterministic and ambiguous spatial relations between Figures and Grounds, respectively. This novel distinction aids in enhancing the understanding of locative event typologies and provides an explanatory model for cross-linguistic analysis. The proposed integrated formal framework combines predicate logic, set theory, and lexical semantics to account for complex locative meanings, with significant applications in computational and theoretical linguistics, as well as cognitive science.
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