Figure and ground: prominence view in locative relations rendered by prepositions 'in,' 'on,' 'at, 'to,' and 'over' depicted in written text taken from the section 'letter from' from the British online newspaper 'The Guardian'

Abstract

Among the abilities that human mind has, there is the one of perceiving prominent objects because of its shape, color, or any other characteristic that could call our attention according to the context. In this thesis, what is intended to be demonstrated is that what our mind is able to segregate can be verbalized by means of using the language. The linguistic devices analyzed in this research are prepositions of place (in, on, at, to and over) and the locative relations established between the connections that they provide are observed and described in order to demonstrate how human mind works in order to organize things, people and places in the space. The corpus of this research was elaborated with 12 letters taken from the section ‗Letters from‘ from the weekly online version of a British newspaper called ‗The Guardian‘. The letters were divided into sentences that contained prepositions in, on, at, to and over which depicted locative relations. After going through the analysis, the results demonstrated that the prepositions play a key role when establishing the prominence of an entity since they are in charge of positioning one entity (figure) as the focus of attention in relation to other entity (ground). Each preposition plays a different role depending on the context they are set and the meaning that the writer wants to depict.