What do people attend to when describing the locations of objects in space? This talk describes a study of the ways in which speakers of seventeen languages describe static spatial relations. The findings show that there are two kinds of spatial relational terms evident crosslinguistically - specific spatial terms and general spatial terms - with different patterns of usage and different elements to their meanings. An examination of the meanings of these two kinds of terms provides support for the importance of geometry, function, and qualitative physics to the meanings of specific spatial terms and suggests an interplay between semantic and pragmatic elements of meaning for general spatial terms.