Horizontal Frames of Reference in Persian

The current article studies the Relative and Intrinsic Frames of Reference on the horizontal plane in Persian. Authentic data was obtained from five pairs of native speakers playing the standard “Ball & Chair” game (Bohnemeyer, 2008). Analysis of the data showed that the use of the Relative FoR is prevalent. Nevertheless, the use of Intrinsic FoR is far from scarce. The Intrinsic FoR was used much more with the chair than the ball and the majority of its uses with the chair were Direct, while with the ball only a few were; from this the necessary distinction between the information regarding the location of an object from the information regarding the orientation of it is adduced. Furthermore, the relators of both the Relative and the Intrinsic FoRs are more diverse when used about the ball than when about the chair. The mapping of the coordinates in the Relative FoR is Reflective; in which the front-back axis is reversed, while the left-right axis remains unchanged.