ABSTRACT
In this book, we have presented a functional geometric framework by which to account for the meaning of spatial prepositions. The three components in the title of the book, saying, seeing, and acting, all play a role in the framework. When describing a particular spatial scene, the speaker chooses expressions that map onto relations in a situation model of that scene that are consistent with the outputs of both geometric routines reflecting how we see the world and extra-geometric routines reflecting how we can act on that world. How these routines are assembled depends on knowledge of the objects involved and memory for relations between those objects. In this final chapter, we consider how the functional geometric framework sits with other recent approaches to language understanding and, in doing so, pick up issues given only a fleeting mention earlier in the book.
