This paper is about contrastively analyzing the on, at, in and káŋ, to, kóno adpositional phrases between English and Mandinka using the RRG theory. By using English secondary data, Mandinka primary data derived from interviews and some elicitation techniques that were carried out among native speakers, this article focuses its analysis on how the aforementioned adpositions are used in discourse to help locate referents in relation to reference points that either refer to space or time. In doing so, it has found some similarities and differences between the two languages as far as the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic interpretations are concerned. Two types of adpositions are distinguished in the two languages: predicative and nonpredicative adpositions. The adpositional phrases are then interpreted according to whether they are predicative or nonpredicative.