Containment and support in Baltic Languages: Overview, experimental evidence, and an extended RCC as applied to Latvian and Lithuania

Abstract

The paper deals with the spatial relations of containment and support in the Baltic languages in a geometric framework. The geometric framework in our research is based on Region Connection Calculus representing different combinations of two circles depending on primitive topological relation of connectedness and extended with the distance, size, orientation and partial occlusion primitives. The research summarises results of two experiments conducted with 105 Latvian and 106 Lithuanian native speakers, provides the interpretation of 8 support and 5 containment stimuli, and gives a preliminary overview of correlation between different independent variables and the granularity and length of the spatial descriptions. Our results indicate a great variation in interpreting the given stimuli in each language, but the contrastive empirical analysis reveals that heterogeneity of interpretation in both languages is similar. For perception of support and containment relations, axial information and connectedness are the determining primitives.