Abstract We introduce a corpus based description of selected adverbial meanings in Czech sentences. Its basic repertory is one of a long lasting tradition in both scientific and school grammars. However, before the corpus era, researchers had to rely on their own excerption; but nowadays, current syntax has a vast material basis in the form of electronic corpora available. On the case of spatial adverbials, we describe our methodology which we used to acquire a detailed, comprehensive, well-arranged description of meanings of adverbials including a list of formal realizations with examples. Theoretical knowledge stemming from this work will lead into an improval of the annotation of the meanings in the Prague Dependency Treebanks which serve as the corpus sources for our research. The Prague Dependency Treebanks include data manually annotated on the layer of deep syntax and thus provide a large amount of valuable examples on the basis of which the meanings of adverbials can be defined more accurately and subcategorized more precisely. Both theoretical and practical results will subsequently be used in NLP, such as machine translation.