Static spatial descriptions in five Germanic languages q Raphael Berthele a, * , Matthew Whelpton b , Åshild Næss c , Pieter Duijff d a University of Fribourg, Rue de Rome 1, CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland b University of Iceland, Sæmundargötu 2, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland c School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia d Fryske Akademy, PO Box 54, 8900 AB Ljouwert/Leeuwarden, The Netherlands article info Article history: Available online 17 August 2014 Keywords: Spatial reference Posture verbs Resultatives Germanic languages Language variation abstract The paper presents qualitative and quantitative analyses of expressions describing static topological relations in Frisian, Icelandic, and Norwegian (Bokmål), Swiss German, and Standard German. According to the literature, speakers of Germanic languages typically express more than just the bare minimum of spatial relational information when describing spatial scenes. As an example, they can add postural or other manner infor- mation as an unmarked choice in their spatial descriptions (the cup stands on the table vs. the cup is on the table). The main focus lies on a detailed description of the modalities and proportions of this additional expression of information on the spatial scene in the five languages. Distributed expression of spatial relational semantics, posture verb usage and resultative constructions are analyzed. Descriptive and inferential methods are used to show the similarities and differences across the five languages, on the level of group tendencies (means), of individual speakers, and of individual stimulus items. The analyses show considerable differences across the languages. Speakers of Standard German and Frisian are most prone to integrate additional manner information into the descriptions, whereas speakers of Icelandic, Norwegian or Swiss German only rarely integrate this kind of information into their spatial descriptions. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction This paper provides a comparative analysis of the linguistic encoding of static topological relations in a sample of Germanic languages: Icelandic, Frisian, Standard High German, Bernese Swiss German, and Norwegian. It examines the degree to which speakers of these languages integrate rather specific information on the spatial configuration into their verbal descriptions q All co-authors have re-coded the data of their respective languages according to the fine-grained coding scheme required for this contribution. The first author is accountable for the global outline, the statistical analyses and most of the main text. All other authors have contributed significantly, by selecting and glossing examples, by adding information on their respective languages, and by correcting or commenting earlier versions of the analyses. Matthew Whelpton and Åshild Næss have contributed detailed discussions of Icelandic and Norwegian examples and structures respectively in Section 3. Cornelia van Scherpenberg has collected and coded the Standard High German data. This work stems from the Evolution of Semantic Systems project and received financial support from the Max Planck Gesellschaft. * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ41 26 300 7140. E-mail addresses: raphael.berthele@unifr.ch (R. Berthele), whelpton@hi.is (M. Whelpton), Aashild.Naess@newcastle.edu.au (Å. Næss), pduijff@fa.knaw.nl (P. Duijff). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Language Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.07.006 0388-0001/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Language Sciences 49 (2015) 82–101