ABSTRACT
The semantic structure of spatial expression is a dependency between two or more entities or events, as can be seen in the following expression of location:
1. the cat on the sofa.
Sentence (1) denotes a situation where one entity, a cat, bears some spatial dependency ('on') to another entity, a sofa. Following Herskovits (1986), we refer to the first member in the relation as the located object [cat in (1)] and the second member as the reference object [sofa in (1)]. The location itself [on in (1)] is thus the relation between the located object and the reference object. Hence the notions of position and place, which intuitively appear to be stable points in our projected world, are in truth dependencies between a located object and a reference object, not static positions or places at all.
