  In this chapter, we assume that systematically studying spatial markers
semantics in language provides a means to reveal fundamental properties and
concepts characterizing conceptual representations of space. We propose a
formal system accounting for the properties highlighted by the linguistic
analysis, and we use these tools for representing the semantic content of
several spatial relations of French. The first part presents a semantic
analysis of the expression of space in French aiming at describing the
constraints that formal representations have to take into account. In the
second part, after presenting the structure of our formal system, we set out
its components. A commonsense geometry is sketched out and several functional
and pragmatic spatial concepts are formalized. We take a special attention in
showing that these concepts are well suited to representing the semantic
content of several prepositions of French ('sur' (on), 'dans' (in), 'devant'
(in front of), 'au-dessus' (above)), and in illustrating the inferential
adequacy of these representations.
