Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of geometrical and nongeometrical features on the use of the lexical concepts NEAR and FAR in English and Finnish.
Participants’ acceptability ratings for these concepts demonstrate that a bar in between a Figure and a Ground acts as a scale-setting object but not as a distance enhancing barrier, shows that the influence of the geometrical feature Figure–Ground distance exceeds the influence of several nongeometrical features, but most of all reveals that language specific lexical properties associated with NEAR and FAR predict language dependent effects for functional relatedness in interaction with Figure–Ground distance and bar presence.