Spatial Relations in Persian : An investigation on the locative use of prepositions with comparison to English

This study is an investigation on the spatial span of Persian prepositions in colloquial speech, focusing on the locative use of prepositions. The results are compared with English prepositions as well. In order to show the functional span of various prepositions, the Typological Relations Picture Series known as TRPS or BowPed is used. This study demonstrates that the spatial span of Persian locative prepositions consists of twenty-eight prepositions, including three primary, seven compound and sixteen secondary prepositions. In some unusual relations in the BLCs (basic locative construction), the Persian prepositions reflect the opposite relation between the figure and ground. In addition, this study shows that there is greater variety of locative prepositions in Persian than English. Finally, the study concludes that like English, Persian allows the use of BLC over the entire range of the (eight) scenes; however, there is an overlap with the scope of BLC construction, which allows the use of resultative construction in Persian as well