Making sense of the spatial metaphor for number in natural language
Rick Nouwen
August 2016 

It is cross-linguistically very common to use locative prepositions as modifiers of numerals. For example, the Romanian example in (1), taken from Corver and Zwarts (2006), uses the locative sub 20 (“below 20”) to indicate that there were fewer than 20 children at the party, just like English would use under in a similar construction. (1) Au fost sub 20 de copii la petrecere. Have been below 20 de-prep children at party ‘There were under 20 children at the party’ What allows such combinations of spatial prepositions and numerals to be meaningful phrases? In this short note, I will propose that scale structure may be an essential part of the answer to this question.

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keywords:	quantity expressions, numerals, scale structure, spatial prepositions, metaphor, linguistic application of measurement theory, semantics
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