The semantics of spatial terms has attracted substantialattention in the cognitive sciences, revealing both compellingsimilarities and striking differences across languages.However, much of the evidence regarding cross-linguisticvariation pertains to fine-grained comparisons betweenindividual lexical items, while cross-linguistic similarities arefound in more coarse-grained studies of the conceptual spaceunderlying semantic systems. We seek to bridge this gap,moving beyond the semantics of individual terms to ask whatthe comparison of spatial semantic systems may reveal aboutthe conceptualization of locations in English and MandarinChinese and about the nature of potential universals in thisdomain. We subjected descriptions of 116 spatial scenes tomultidimensional scaling analyses in order to reveal thestructures of the underlying conceptual spaces in eachlanguage. In addition to revealing overlaps and divergences inthe conceptualization of space in English and Mandarin, ourresults suggest a difference in complexity, whereby Mandarinterms are accommodated by a lower-dimensional similarityspace than are English terms.

Previous researchers on the semantics of spatial relational terms have reported the importance of geometric factors (e.g., Bennett. 1975; Talmy, 1983), the importance of functional factors {e.g., Coventry, Carmichael, and Garrod, 1994; Vandeloise, 1991), and the lack of importance of the nature of the Figure, or object located (e.g., Landau and Stecker, 1990; Talmy, 1983). In this paper, we present the results of an experiment testing each of these claims for the English spatial prepositions IN and ON. Our findings confirm that geometric and functional factors are indeed important. In addition, our results suggest that the nature of the Figure contributes to the selection of spatial prepositions.