Several psycholinguistic theories have appealed to the linguistic notion of markedness to help explain asymmetrical patterns of behavioural data. We suggest that this sort of markedness is best thought of as a derived rather than a primitive notion, emerging when the distributional properties of linguistic categories interact with general-purpose…

The location of an object is often described by spatially relating it to a known landmark. The spatial terms used in such descriptions can provide various types of information. For example, projective terms such as "above" indicate direction but not distance, whereas proximal terms such as "near" indicate distance but not direction. Previous…