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Musings on Prepositions
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Wed Jan 13, 2010 12:55 am    Post subject: Musings on Prepositions Reply with quote

Just a random thought I had about prepositions (and postpositions, inpositions, circumpositions and what have you). For languages (say Latin) that contain both inherent case and prepositions, the preposition combined with the case ending can kind of be thought of as marking a separate case. You can write a kind of equation for it: [preposition] + [noun case] = [final case]. So rather than thinking of Latin in urbe as in city-ABL, you can think of the whole thing as city-INESS. (In urbem would then be city-ILL.)

For something like English, where all prepositions take the same case, you can kind of set [noun case] = 0 so that [preposition] = [final case].

I guess the real important part of this is defining prepositions in wholly grammatical terms - there's really no semantic part to them. I don't know if prepositions are already considered particles (and if they are then this is mostly pointless), but if they aren't they probably should be.

It might run into strangenesses when you consider that in urbe is city-INESS but in mensa is table-SUPERESS, but I guess it kind of works.

Am I insane?
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Hemicomputer



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PostPosted: Fri Jan 15, 2010 2:14 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Interesting! I would really like to examine that pattern in other similar languages. I've heard that Icelandic has remarkably similar grammar to Latin, so it might work for that.

Quote:
Am I insane?
I'm really not qualified to say. This little ramble makes perfect sense to me, though.
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Fri Jan 15, 2010 3:10 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hemicomputer wrote:
Interesting! I would really like to examine that pattern in other similar languages. I've heard that Icelandic has remarkably similar grammar to Latin, so it might work for that.

Never heard that before (not that I've really looked much at Icelandic). I'd love to see an example of a glossed Icelandic sentence then (especially one with prepositions)!

I know it works in Greek - in Greek prepositions take any case other than nominative (i.e. genitive, dative or accusative) and so can have up to three meanings based on which case they're used with.
EDIT: That is, Biblical/Koine Greek. IDK about any other form, though I would expect it to work in earlier forms at least.

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I'm really not qualified to say. This little ramble makes perfect sense to me, though.

Yay! ^_^
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Kiri



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PostPosted: Fri Jan 15, 2010 1:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well it makes no sense to me, but that is due to my lack of knowledge rather than anything else Smile
So, keep on going Very Happy
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eldin raigmore
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 15, 2010 7:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
I guess the real important part of this is defining prepositions in wholly grammatical terms - there's really no semantic part to them.

Many theorists -- actually, entire schools of them -- consider adpositions to be a more meaning-full class than adverbs. So depending on which school you belong to you might think the main parts-of-speech are
nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs
or
nouns and verbs and adjectives and adpositions.

So an individual adposition in an individual language probably does have "meaning", although adpositions are notoriously polysemous and also notoriously unpredictable and hard-to-translate.

But you're right about the word-class of adpositions -- the part-of-speech -- being defined entirely grammatically; there's no semantic unity to the word-class "adpositions" that holds across different languages, and probably not much of one that holds even in any one language.

Some languages, I think an Indian language, (actually I think Hindi), can apply both a preposition and a postposition to the same object noun-phrase; the meaning of the adpositional phrase depends on which combination is used. (In fact IIRC there's a third variable as well, but I don't know whether it's a third adposition or the noun's case -- I'm betting its' the noun's case.)
Some languages, including IIANM some of those same ones mentioned in the prevous paragraph, can use the same word as either a preposition or as a postposition, with different meanings.

Ancient Greek had four cases (Nom, Acc, Dat, Gen) and only a dozen prepositions. But every preposition "governed" at least two of the cases, most "governed" three, and some "governed" all four. It was the combination of the preposition with the case that determined the meaning; the same preposition with a different case, or the same case with a different preposition, meant something else.
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Fri Jan 15, 2010 7:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

eldin raigmore wrote:
Many theorists -- actually, entire schools of them -- consider adpositions to be a more meaning-full class than adverbs. So depending on which school you belong to you might think the main parts-of-speech are
nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs
or
nouns and verbs and adjectives and adpositions.

Well, that's interesting. I would bet you could argue either side on a language-by-language basis - adverbs could be more 'meaningful' in one language, adpositions in another.
(If I understand what you mean by 'meaningful'.)

Quote:
So an individual adposition in an individual language probably does have "meaning", although adpositions are notoriously polysemous and also notoriously unpredictable and hard-to-translate.

'Meaning' as in a semantic component? (I would assume so.)

Quote:
Some languages, I think an Indian language, (actually I think Hindi), can apply both a preposition and a postposition to the same object noun-phrase; the meaning of the adpositional phrase depends on which combination is used. (In fact IIRC there's a third variable as well, but I don't know whether it's a third adposition or the noun's case -- I'm betting its' the noun's case.)

I'd guess noun case also - it'd get rather messy if you had three adpositions floating around a noun at once. Sounds like a fun system though ^_^ Do you have any more info on it?
(Looks ripe for pirating into a conlang!)

Quote:
Some languages, including IIANM some of those same ones mentioned in the prevous paragraph, can use the same word as either a preposition or as a postposition, with different meanings.

Now that's interesting. I like it.

Quote:
Ancient Greek had four cases (Nom, Acc, Dat, Gen) and only a dozen prepositions. But every preposition "governed" at least two of the cases, most "governed" three, and some "governed" all four. It was the combination of the preposition with the case that determined the meaning; the same preposition with a different case, or the same case with a different preposition, meant something else.

Exactly. (I wasn't aware any prepositions governed the nominative though, and IIRC there are a few with just one (but I could be wrong - it's been almost three years since my Greek I class)).
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eldin raigmore
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 16, 2010 11:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
Well, that's interesting. I would bet you could argue either side on a language-by-language basis - adverbs could be more 'meaningful' in one language, adpositions in another.
(If I understand what you mean by 'meaningful'.)
I hadn't thought about that before, but I can't think why that would be impossible. In the ZBB's "Parts of Speech" thread (which may be gone now; if so some of the discussion is still in the Kneequickie), a moderator (Nuntar) had requested some other theories' ideas; so a generativist (Psygnisfive) put in the generativist PoV on the whole word-class thing, and considered the major lexical-content (i.e. semantics or meaning contained in the word) classes to be N, V, Adj, and Adp instead of Adv.

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
'Meaning' as in a semantic component? (I would assume so.)
Right; in my previous post I used "meaning-full" as an ordinary-language near-synonym of "high lexical semantic content".

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
I'd guess noun case also - it'd get rather messy if you had three adpositions floating around a noun at once. Sounds like a fun system though ^_^ Do you have any more info on it?
(Looks ripe for pirating into a conlang!)
I think it was in [url=http://books.google.com/books?id=PXdXR9FpiEEC&pg=PP1&dq=Concise+compendium+of+the+world's+languages+By+George+L.+Campbell&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false]"Concise compendium of the world's languages" by George L. Campbell[/url].

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
Now that's interesting. I like it.
So do I!

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
Exactly. (I wasn't aware any prepositions governed the nominative though, and IIRC there are a few with just one (but I could be wrong - it's been almost three years since my Greek I class)).
Well, I never had a Greek class, so I have an even higher ability to be wrong than you.

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
Am I insane?
Probably, but you've posted no evidence on this thread. Wink Razz
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 12:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

eldin raigmore wrote:
I hadn't thought about that before, but I can't think why that would be impossible. In the ZBB's "Parts of Speech" thread (which may be gone now; if so some of the discussion is still in the Kneequickie), a moderator (Nuntar) had requested some other theories' ideas; so a generativist (Psygnisfive) put in the generativist PoV on the whole word-class thing, and considered the major lexical-content (i.e. semantics or meaning contained in the word) classes to be N, V, Adj, and Adp instead of Adv.

Hm, I'll have to take a look at that. From my limited perspective with IE langs only, adpositions seem nearly devoid of semantic content - I'd like to see how it's argued the other way.
(It makes more sense if they end up lumping adverbs into the adjective category - leaving them out as a major semantic-content category doesn't make any sense to me.)

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
Am I insane?
Probably, but you've posted no evidence on this thread. Wink Razz[/quote]
Razz
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Baldash



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PostPosted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 12:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Adverbs and adpositions in my conlang are verbs inflected as adverbs or adpositions. A monovalent verb inflected as an adverb is an adverb, a bivalent verb inflected as an adverb is an adverbial adposition, a bivalent verb might be inflected as an adjectival adposition. To derive them from trivalent verbs is also possible, then you get adpositions that take two objects. So adpositions have as much semantic content as verbs in the conlang.

e.g. the preposition "in" in "I saw you in the house" is derived from a verb meaning "is inside of". (Maybe you could paraphrase it as "I saw you being-inside-of the house")
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 5:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Sounds like adpositions in your lang count more like relative clauses with the marker as an inflection rather than an actual pronoun. Are you allowed other words within the clause, like time adverbs and such?

(Emitare does much the same thing with full-blown relative clauses, but it has a bunch of case affixes too. Oddly enough, it also creates adverbs the same way.)
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Baldash



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PostPosted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 6:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
Sounds like adpositions in your lang count more like relative clauses with the marker as an inflection rather than an actual pronoun. Are you allowed other words within the clause, like time adverbs and such?

Not quite.

a) car-n red-adj = a red car
b) car-n-the in-adj forest-n-the = the car in the forest

So if you call the adposition in (b) a relative clause, then the adjective in (a) is that too. I.e. "a car that is red".

Adpositions can't take tense, and relative clauses are distinct. They use a relativizer, not a relative pronoun, that is identical to the genitive adposition, and the relative clause contains a resumptive pronoun (or several). Adpositions can't be modified by other words as if they were verbs.

On the other hand

c) red-v car-n-the = the car is red
d) in-v car-n-the forest-n-the = the car is in the forest
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 6:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Your adjectives look like adjectives in Japanese, which are barely distinguishable from verbs. I'd definitely translate (a) as 'a car that is red'.
(Then adpositions in your lang would be verbs with adjectival morphology.)

So your -adj marker looks more like an 'attributive' marker (which is how I probably should have described it in the first place). Does your morphology prevent the attachment of the -adj marker to verbs? Seems like after a while one of the two systems (relative and attributive) would displace the other. (And if you could theoretically add tense and such before -adj, it's even more likely.)
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eldin raigmore
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 8:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
Hm, I'll have to take a look at that. From my limited perspective with IE langs only, adpositions seem nearly devoid of semantic content - I'd like to see how it's argued the other way.

I disagree with "devoid". There's a difference between "not much" and "none". There's also a difference between "not very specific" and "not specific at all". I'd say English and French and German and Spanish prepositions -- the languages I've managed to get some idea of the prepositions in -- do each one of them have one or a few not-too-specific meaning(s) in most uses, with occasionally some oddball uses that don't fit any of the non-specific meanings meant in the majority of uses.

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
(It makes more sense if they end up lumping adverbs into the adjective category - leaving them out as a major semantic-content category doesn't make any sense to me.)

Well, as you can imagine if you know the ZBB, the generativist position was not the favorite position of most responders to the thread.
Most languages appear to fall somewhere on this scale:

* Those with nouns and verbs, but without adjectives (or adverbs)
** because "adjectival meanings" are expressed by nouns in this language
** because "adjectival meanings" are expressed by verbs in this language
** something else

* Those with nouns and verbs and modifiers (including adjectives), but without adverbs.
** because "adverbial meanings" are expressed by adjectives
** something else

* Those with nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs all distinct word-classes

--------------------------------------

The open word-classes (those in which word-coining or borrowing is still going on) and the large word-classes (which tend to be the same as the open word-classes) usually can be classified as nouns or verbs or adjectives or adverbs or nouns-and-adjectives or verbs-and-adjectives or adjectives-and-adverbs.

Adpositions are usually not an open word-class and usually not a large word-class.

But the generativist position considers words (or maybe just the words with a lot of lexical, semantic content) to have two binary characteristics (possibly among others), which because I can't remember what they're really called, I'm going to call "Nounishness" and "Verbishness".

They say the [+N,-V] words are Nouns, the [-N,+V] words are Verbs, the [+N,+V] words are Adjectives, and the [-N,-V] words to be Adpositions.

Or maybe I've got that wrong.

Anyway, IMO Adverbs have more meaning -- heavier lexical content or heavier semantic content -- than Adpositions do. But one can see why the adpositions can be thought of as behaving in a syntactically more complicated manner than adverbs. Adpositions can have valency 2; but adjectives and adverbs can't have valency more than 1 (a case could be made that adverbs only have valency 0), and nouns really have only valency 0. (Verbs can have valency 3 or more.)

Some schools of grammarians consider adverbs to be a kind of noun instead of a separate part-of-speech.
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Baldash



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PostPosted: Mon Jan 18, 2010 4:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
Your adjectives look like adjectives in Japanese, which are barely distinguishable from verbs. I'd definitely translate (a) as 'a car that is red'.

Well, I guess that translation might work. But ALL parts of speech are like this in my conlang, giving

e) car(v) red-n-the = the red one is a car
f) red-n car-adj ≈ a red thing that is a car

g) car-n-the laŋgelaš past red(v) car-anaphor-n = the car that was red
h) car-n-the laŋgelaš maybe will see(v) I-n car-anaphor-n = the car that I maybe will see

(note that laŋgelaš is "have-inverse-adj")

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
(Then adpositions in your lang would be verbs with adjectival morphology.)

Yes, adjectival adpositions. Adjectival adpositions and adverbial adpositions are marked differently.

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
So your -adj marker looks more like an 'attributive' marker (which is how I probably should have described it in the first place). Does your morphology prevent the attachment of the -adj marker to verbs?

Yes and no. Yes: you can't attach the marker to a verb without the verb becoming an adjective. No: any verb might take the suffix, and become an adjective. And all adjectives are like that, and if you remove the marker from any adjective you get a verb. And the same applies to all nouns: any verb might take the noun suffix, and they become nouns, and all nouns have that suffix, and when removed they become verbs. The same applies to all parts of speech, whenever the semantics of the root makes the combination make sense.

i) car(v) I-n = I am a car
j) I(v) car-n-the = the car is me

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
Seems like after a while one of the two systems (relative and attributive) would displace the other.

But the "attributive" system is much more efficient, since a relative clause requires at least two additional words (the relativizer and the anaphor, three syllables each), while you are unable to indicate TMA or modify the verb with adverbs without a relative clause, and the head noun can't play any other role than subject without a relative clause.

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
(And if you could theoretically add tense and such before -adj, it's even more likely.)

Well, the language doesn't have inflectional tense. But there is inflectional aspect, well there is two aspect-like caterories. One is dynamics: either static or dynamic. The other is perfective or imperfective. The first distinction is made for all words, regardless part of speech. The difference between "in" and "into" is that the former is static, and the latter is dynamic.

k) walk(v) he-n in-static-adv forest-n-the = he walked in the forest
l) walk(v) he-n in-dynamic-adv forest-n-the = he walked into the forest

m) in-static(v) he-n forest-n-the = he was in the forest
n) in-dynamic(v) he-n forest-n-the = he entered the forest

But the latter category is only for verbs.

o) walk-imperf(v) he-n in-adv forest-n-the = he was walking in the forest

But the same affix that marks the verb imperfective is also applied to nouns, whenever you want to change a count noun to a mass noun.

p) sheep-n = a sheep / a goat
q) sheep-imperf-n = mutton / chevon
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Mon Jan 18, 2010 5:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

SO MUCH TO REPLY TO
So this will probably be more concise than it ought to.

@Eldin: I guess I can see where the generativists are coming from then. I would assume under that classification that adverbs would also be +N+V.

I do very much agree with the majority view though.

@Baldash: interesting parts-of-speech marking system, I completely misunderstood it. I like it ^_^
I bet that's one of the cleanest methods of creating a language that has arguably only one actual part of speech (verbs in your case).

Your aspect system is cool too. (I think I saw an example of something similar in Arabic, where live-stative = live (in a place) and live-dynamic = settle.
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eldin raigmore
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2010 10:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

@Baldash:
Hey, that's cool! Cool
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Baldash



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PostPosted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 12:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks Smile
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eldin raigmore
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 9:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Tolkien_Freak wrote:
S@Eldin: I guess I can see where the generativists are coming from then. I would assume under that classification that adverbs would also be +N+V.
I do very much agree with the majority view though.

From Kiri's latest post (to a different thread), it seems possible that in Latvian there's no difference between adverbs and adpositions. I don't know for sure, since I don't know any Latvian.
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Kiri



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PostPosted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 9:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Do you mean those little words like "with" or "at", when you say "adposition"? Because, if you do, then I can't see any way they could possibly be the same as adverbs Smile
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Tolkien_Freak



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PostPosted: Wed Jan 20, 2010 10:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Indeed - 'in', 'at, 'on', etc.

How would that be theoretically possible, unless you have adverbs that can also be used as adpositions (i.e. two separate meanings)?
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