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[William Broom]

It's really a different standard for every console. For example, 360 games will invariably use the right trigger to shoot, whereas PS3 shooters will use the upper right shoulder button, despite having perfectly serviceable triggers in the same place as on the 360's controller.
Even though it's logical to determine what button does what by its position, I think in practice, developers usually decide by the name of the button. For example, the A button has always been the first button on Nintendo's controllers, used for jumping, accelerating and interacting. Then on the DS, B became the first button and A was placed to the right. But in DS games, A is still used for jumping, accelerating and so on.
If you're making a game for a certain controller, you should definitely put in some hours playing games with that controller to work out how it feels and where you want to map your buttons. Is that why you're asking or are you just curious?

[Michaël Samyn]

We're making a game for PC. So there is no standard.
But we're also hoping to port it to a console (Playstation, most likely). So we might as well get the game controller setup right in the PC version.

I'm also simply curious about standards.

[Jrsquee]

* At least on the PS2/PSP. I say this because some early American PS1 games use triangle to back out of menus, which is rather inconsistent.

Final Fantasy VIII used ∆ to back out of the menus, X for select/action, [] to talk, and O for...  something.

[William Broom]

Having played a lot of PS2 games, I can tell you that the Western standard for menus is X to select and Triangle to go back. The Japanese standard I'm not so sure of but I think it's O to select and X to go back. The Japanese standard is sometimes changed in the English release but not always, for example MGS3 retains that standard.

What genre of game are you developing? That would probably allow us to help you a bit better.

[Michaël Samyn]

This is for The Path. It's a horror game, but not action-based.