The semantic potential referred to in the title of this book is the ability of humans to learn the (closed-class) terms for basic spatial relations, such as (for English) onto, above, and through. Regier presents a modified connectionist model of this ability designed to address three questions: (a) What kind of system can learn spatial terms? (b) How can this system function without negative evidence? and (c) What are the universal constraints on learnable spatial terms? The answers suggested to these questions are: (a) a modified connectionist network—one which incorporates structural constraints motivated by human physiology; (b) the assumption of mutual exclusion, that is, that different terms have mutually exclusive denotations; and (c) the structural constraints that are incorporated into the network.