A comparative and contrastive analysis of the prepositions of place and time in Turkish and English

This paper attempts a comparative and contrastive analysis about the subsystems of the prepositions (of Time and Place ) in Turkish and English, in terms of their uses, function and meanings in order to find the major similarities and differences between Turkish and English and to account for any possible deviations that may characterize the performance of Turkish learners.The result has shown that there are similarities and differences between these two subsystems of the prepositions (of Time and Place) in Turkish and English. The similarities between them facilitate the development process of learning a foreign language (positive transfer), whereas differences make learning process of a foreign language difficult and Turkish learners make many mistakes (negative transfer or interference).This study has pedagogical implications for teaching prepositions in English to help teachers and motivate them to describe and analyse the learners? errors and also to prepare remedial exercises to eliminate the errors their students make.Key words: Preposition, comparative, contrastive, similarity, difference,transfer.