A cross-linguistic study of spatial location descriptions in New Zealand English and Brazilian Portuguese natural language

Humans use spatial language on a daily basis, to describe locations, give directions, and ask for information about places. Better understanding of spatial language can assist in developing natural language interfaces and querying tools for GIS and web mapping. However, most previous studies focus on artificial, indoor situations. We conduct cross-linguistic experiments to compare natural language relative location descriptions (e.g., the house beside the river) in New Zealand English (NZE) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) using eight real outdoor locations to discover the differences that occur when people describe the same location in the two languages. Our results show that NZE uses a wider range of spatial relation terms (e.g., beside) and reference objects (e.g., river) than BP, that BP uses more projective spatial relation terms than NZE, which prefers directional terms, and that translation between spatial relation terms is context-dependent.