Spatial Frames of Reference in Persian

Space has always been an important issue for philosophers and thinkers. The representation of spatial concepts in language has also been a concern for linguists. With the introduction of Gestalt psychology and Cognitive linguistics, a new interest in spatial language arose. One of the key elements in spatial linguistic studies is the concept of the Frame of Reference. A spatial Frame of Reference is a coordinate system by which a speaker of any given language determines the location of a figure in respect to a ground in space.
The current article’s aim is to study the Spatial Frames of Reference in Persian. The main questions are if the speakers first describe the object on the right or the object on the left of the photo, if they first describe the man or the tree first, and what the main Spatial Frames of Reference in Persian are. It was supposed that the speakers first describe what is on the right, first describe the tree, and use the relative and intrinsic FoRs.
In order to obtain real data from the native speakers, the main 8 photos of the second set of photos from the “Man & Tree” game devised by Max Planc Institute were used. In each photo, there is a man and a tree, and their positions in the photo and in respect to each other differs. The game was done with three pair of players as instructed by the standard manual and the data were analyzed accordingly.
The utterances which where ambiguous between two FoRs were put aside. The analysis of the data showed that in a spatial scene consisting of a man and a tree, the Persian speakers tend to first describe the object on the right, which can be due to the fact that the Persian writing has a right to left system. In addition, between man and tree, the speakers tend to describe the tree first. In this scene, the tree is the ground, since it is bigger and more stable than the man. An interesting point was that in all the cases where the tree was on the right, it was described first. Furthermore, in order to describe the spatial relation between the man and the tree, the speakers use the Relative frame of reference, in which the man is the figure and the tree is the ground; yet, in describing the facing position of the man, they use the Intrinsic frame of reference, in which the man is the ground and in most cases the tree is the figure.