A Functional Analysis of the Uses of Preposition ba in Persian

Abstract

The abundant use of prepositions in Persian has led the present study to choose the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), a structural-functional theory of grammar, in order to investigate the logical structure representations of some sentences containing the preposition ba meaning 'with'. This is to find out the semantic and structural motivations of this preposition assignment to Persian NPs. This article concludes that the preposition ba, is a basically locative preposition and a radial category with senses related to the central, primary maning of 'togetherness' and 'having'. As a consequence, it can be shown that one cannot be restricted solely to the primary preposition assignment rules stated in RRG, and must focus on the semantic motivations to represent the logical structure of the sentences containing prepositions, in a better way. In this way, we avoid the problems and issues in RRG primary logical structure representations. In addition, the analysis presented in this study is able to justify the various uses of the Preposition ba in Persian, such as adverbial, commutative, theme-marking and, instrumental ba.

Keywords

• role and reference grammar
• farrel approach
• preposition ba
• logical structure
• radial category