Inflection of Prepositions in Italian Language and its Effects Iranian Language Learners

This paper investigates inflection and inflectional features in the category of preposition in Italian and how Iranian language learners, learning Italian as a foreign language, deal with it. The analysis of different forms of inflected prepositions, the types of errors and their classification leads to the findings that: the prepositions in Italian language agree with their noun complement in number, person and gender, a feature not available in Persian, which causes some difficulties for Iranian language learners. The analysis of students’ errors indicates two types of errors occurred mostly: addition and deletion. The research emphasizes the pedagogical implications for teaching prepositions in Italian language to help teachers and motivate them to take into consideration this typological difference between Persian and Italian in the use of prepositions.