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 ...
