This chapter provides a formal and semantic typology of the highly elaborate spatial deictic systems involving an elevation component found in the Alor-Pantar languages. The systems show a high degree of variation both in the number of paradigms of elevation-marked terms as well as in the number of semantic components within the different elevational domains. The chapter further considers the history and reconstructability of an elevational system to proto-Alor-Pantar, observing that the elevation distinction itself is very stable in the deictic systems of the AP languages, but that the terms of the systems are not always stable and that the systems are often subject to elaboration
