Abstract The goal of this paper is to show that Mandarin localisers and spatial nouns (e.g. qian ‘front’ and qian-mian ‘front-side’, respectively) are part of a nominal super-category but display complementary discourse properties. At the sentential level, both categories can be combined with prepositions (e.g. zai zhuozi hou ‘behind the table’), and form phrases and sentences describing the location of an entity under discussion. At the discourse level, however, only spatial nouns can act as anaphors to previous prepositional phrases, thereby licensing ground NP ellipsis. We show that their differing discourse properties depend on their grammatical properties, and determine how anaphoric relations are established: spatial nouns always introduce direct reference to discourse-relevant locations. We offer a formal account based on a combination of Lexical Syntax with Discourse Representation Theory, and discuss the consequences of this account for a theory of spatial categories in Mandarin.

中文翻译：

---

普通话空间名词和介词的照指性质：正式说明

摘要 本文的目的是表明普通话本地化词和空间名词（例如分别为 qian 'front' 和 qian-mian 'front-side'）是名词性超范畴的一部分，但显示出互补的话语属性。在句子层面，这两个类别都可以与介词组合（例如在桌子后面“在桌子后面”），并形成描述所讨论实体位置的短语和句子。然而，在语篇层面，只有空间名词可以作为先前介词短语的照应，从而允许基础 NP 省略。我们展示了它们不同的话语属性取决于它们的语法属性，并决定了照应关系是如何建立的：空间名词总是引入对话语相关位置的直接指称。