Basic locative prepositions in Italian a, in, su. Their meaning and use

This thesis aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the usage of the basic locative prepositions a, in, and su in contemporary Italian based on grammatical rules, corpus (CORIS/CODIS), and the opinions of native speakers. In the first section of the theoretical part, the prepositions, as parts of speech, are defined and basic examples and rules of their locative usage are extracted from grammar books. The following sections are focused on prepositional syntagma competition (al bar vs. nel bar vs. in bar, etc.). Since traditional grammar books do not deal with issues of prepositional competition, the theoretical basis of these issues is given using academic articles from www.treccani.it as a source. In the analytical part of this thesis, selected prepositional syntagmata are examined as the object of a corpus study. This is done using the CORIS/CODIS corpus, allowing for the examination of the syntagmata in the context of authentic texts. Model phrases from the corpus are presented and tendencies in usage of the examined locative prepositions are given based on the corpus data. Finally, data from a questionnaire-based survey is shown to correspond with the corpus-based conclusions