Questions tagged [adpositions]

A class of words whose most central members characteristically express spatial or temporal relations.

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How do linguists distinguish between case endings and postpositions, especially in languages which have both and/or have no traditional grammar?

In my attempt to learn Georgian, an agglutinative language of the South Caucasus, I have learned that it has both case endings and postpositions. I also have some familiarity with Korean and Japanese ...
hippietrail's user avatar
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Indo-European prepositions: whence did they come?

What manner of theories are there on the origin of Indo-European case-like prepositions (usually; they were originally postpositions, and a handful of languages still have postpositions)? They seem ...
Justin Olbrantz's user avatar
11 votes
5 answers
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How usual is it for languages to have both prepositions and postpositions?

It has seemed to me (though I might be wrong) that languages usually take either prepositions (English, German, Spanish) or postpositions (Japanese, Hungarian, Turkish). (Yes I know sometimes a ...
hippietrail's user avatar
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7 votes
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Preposition and postposition at the same time?

In sentences like two days before Easter, "Easter" is the complement of the preposition "before", but what about the complement "two days"? Seeing that we can also say ...
maliktunga's user avatar
7 votes
3 answers
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Head directionality parameter and adpositions in Finnish

As I understand from the principles and parameters theory, all parameters are binary. In particular, the head directionality parameter can be set to either "head-first" or "head-last". The setting of ...
Otavio Macedo's user avatar
2 votes
3 answers
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Do Dravidian languages have postpositions? Do any of them also have any prepositions?

I know that the Dravidian languages are agglutinating type and have noun cases but I was interested in whether they also have postpositions. I'm assuming they do. I also wonder if some might also have ...
hippietrail's user avatar
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Should Japanese postpositions be treated as belonging to the same category as English prepositions?

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and WALS, as well as Wikipedia, treat both English prepositions and Japanese postpositions (particles) as belonging to 'adpositions' (although CGEL ...
Bathrobe's user avatar
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1 answer
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Is there an adposition type that occurs before both the modified noun and the object?

From what I've read, there are four attested types of adpositions. Prepositions and postpositions are the most common, but circumpositions (discontinuous morphemes that occur around their objects) ...
James Grossmann's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
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Postposition + Subordinator + Noun

[I originally asked this question on SE Chinese, but my question has a strong linguistic orientation, so I re-posted it here, with more technical terms and a more technical question] According to Paul ...
Starckman's user avatar
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What is the difference between case marking particles and adpositions?

Apparently there is some relevant book which claims, more or less: Case marking particles and adpositions are not identical, one is a morphological, one a syntactic unit. This claim was heard ...
meireikei's user avatar
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Doesn't Sanskrit use adpositions of any kind?

For some reason, the Wikipedia article makes no mention of any adpositions of any kind. I find it highly unbelievable that the language makes no use of such. It has a case system, but there's only 8 ...
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Are adpositions lexical or grammatical morphemes?

In English, prepositions have something in common with most grammatical morphemes: they're a closed class. However, some phrasal prepositions in English contain lexical morphemes: "on top of," "on ...
James Grossmann's user avatar
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Across languages, do adverbial adpositional phrases ever modify other adpositional phrases?

In English, I've found examples of two consecutive adverbial prepositional phrases both modifying the rest of a verb group, e.g., "He won't go out of the town because of the animals." "...
James Grossmann's user avatar