0 a tall, pointed structure on top of a building, especially on top of a church tower
1 a tall, narrow structure that rises to a point, esp. on a church:
The mountains’ rocky spires surrounded us.
A spire is an inherent part of a building, and this imposes a semantic relation restriction on the denotation of the complement.
Moreover, the notions of 'conceptual autonomy' and 'conceptual dependency' fail to capture the difference in conceptualization between, for example, the nouns church and spire.
Prior to steel construction, church towers and spires were the sole pointers to the sky.
Even the sky is building to thunder; and it is impossible to believe other than that, in the church spire, the bells are pealing discordantly.
The measurement of the overall shell height was taken from the base of the aperture to the top of the spire.
Two substantial glazed apertures in the south elevation provide views south towards a nearby spire.
For 'spire', too, the cognitive perspective is that of 'church'.
Let us consider the role of conceptual perspective in distinguishing between the concepts 'church' and 'spire'.