The goal of this paper is to offer an argument for the Sociotopographic Model and its extension to dialectal data. It is shown that Italian and one of its dialects, Aquilan, seem to differ with respect to which reference systems their prepositions can describe. Aquilan includes an absolute and an elevational reference system; Italian only includes an absolute system. It is proposed that this difference is strongly correlated to Aquilan being a dialect spoken in a mountainous valley, and therefore reflecting the “lay of the land” in its spatia...