The goal of this paper is to account for the distribution of Mandarin spatial adpositions with measure phrases, categories that measure quantities under discussion (in this case, length, e.g. shi mi 'ten metres'). We account how this distribution determines their classification into bounded/unbounded prepositions. We show that such an account must consider localisers (e.g. qian 'front') and so-called spatial nouns (e.g. qian-mian 'front-face') as part of the adpositional phrase, even if previous studies leave spatial nouns aside. We show that in this language this distinction has two important...
