animacy and spatial terms

[Michele Feist]

Greetings,

I'm a graduate student at Northwestern University working on the semantics
of spatial prepositions.  I've started to investigate the kinds of factors
about a scene that influence the use of these terms, and I've become
interested in the effect of animacy.

My question for the list:  Have you (or anyone you know of) investigated
the effect of either the animacy of the object located (Talmy's Figure) or
or the animacy of the reference object (Talmy's Ground) on the use of
spatial relational terms?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Michele

Michele Feist
Department of Linguistics
Northwestern University
2016 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208

m-feist at nwu.edu