Prepositions, postpositions, and the partitioning of space: A theoretical review of spatial language acquisition in Hindi and English

Children everywhere learn to talk about containment, support, proximity, and orientation, but languages divide these relations differently and encode them with different grammatical means. This article reviews research on the acquisition of spatial language in order to derive explicit, testable predictions for children acquiring Hindi and English, two Indo-European languages that differ in adposition order, in the morphosyntax of the locative phrase, in the semantic boundaries of their spatial terms, and in how they encode motion. English locates a figure with prepositions and path particles (in, on, into, out). Hindi uses phrase-final simple postpositions (mẽ, par, se), complex genitive-based postpositions (ke nīce, ke pīche), oblique case marking on the ground noun, and verbs that encode path. Drawing on cross-linguistic acquisition research, the comparatively small body of direct evidence on Hindi-speaking children, and closely related Urdu data, the review argues that a broadly shared conceptual sequence is likely to be overlaid by language-specific effects in four areas: morphological complexity within the locative phrase, the semantic partitioning of topological relations, the encoding of motion, and the choice of spatial frame of reference. Eight propositions are formulated, each paired with a method by which it could be tested. The review also examines the conceptual problems of comparing “Hindi-speaking” and “English-speaking” children in a multilingual setting such as India, and outlines implications for language-sensitive assessment and early education.