•The article offers novel data on Mandarin adpositions, localisers, spatial nouns.•It explores these data at an intra- and inter-sentential level.•The account is the first to capture these data.•The analysis has potentially cross-linguistic applications.•General considerations are offered for a theory of spatial categories. 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 discourse properties depend on their grammatical properties, and determine how anaphoric relations are established: spatial nouns always introduce direct reference to discourse-relevant locations. We offer a formal account based on a combination of Lexical Syntax with Discourse Representation Theory, and discuss the consequences of this account for a theory of spatial categories in Mandarin.