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This paper describes the discourse functions of spatial adverbials in initial detached position within the framework of the Discourse Framing hypothesis (also referred to as ‘Forwardlabelling’ model, Charolles 1997). The first part presents the model and describes the ‘forward-labelling’ function of spatial adverbials in initial detached position. The second part presents the corpus of film summaries on which our study is based. We then focus on two specific issues: the identification of the end of the scope of spatial adverbials (part 3), and their ability to function as discourse anchoring markers (part 4). Our analysis confirms that spatial adverbials create groups of information, but also shows that propositions in these groups are not necessarily co-indexed with circumstances defined by the adverb. It also suggests that spatial adverbials hardly become topics in the sense of ‘aboutness’, and are better accounted for by the notions of story anchoring or story priming in this type of text.