Timeline for How does Tok Pisin get by with just a few prepositions?
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| Jun 17, 2020 at 9:49 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Dec 3, 2018 at 20:41 | comment | added | amI | That's a good answer. | |
| Dec 3, 2018 at 20:31 | comment | added | b a | @amI Again, I am not an authority on the language, but I'm guessing it might be because it isn't used independently of long. In English, inside can be used as a preposition without of. In any case, I was not the one who made nor propagated the claim that Tok Pisin has only two prepositions, so I don't know what analysis was used to make the claim | |
| Dec 3, 2018 at 20:10 | comment | added | amI | That has nested PPs, as does "inside of". Why not see two prepositions there? Note that bilong (belong) is used for possessive 'of', and long (along) is used for other relationships (at, by, to, with, etc.), requiring another word to be specific. I just don't see why that other word isn't called a preposition too. | |
| Dec 3, 2018 at 19:54 | comment | added | b a | @amI I am not an authority on the language, but I imagine "insait long" would be a prepositional phrase, like the English "on the other side of" where the preposition is "of." | |
| Dec 3, 2018 at 18:37 | comment | added | amI | So why isn't 'insait' considered to be a preposition, as 'inside' can be? | |
| Apr 24, 2018 at 12:26 | comment | added | hippietrail | This seems pretty similar to Japanese and Chinese. Japanese only has a few prepositions and spatial relationships will use one or two of them in combination with a noun. "no" is "of" and "ni" is "in, at, on". So "insait long X" would "X no naka ni". Chinese is pretty similar but uses verbs like "zai" and "you" with much the same characters Japanese uses but pronounced differently so something like "X li you". | |
| Jan 31, 2018 at 11:05 | comment | added | Keelan | +1, I also thought about Ugaritic. Polysemy is of course very common with prepositions. In at some languages, there seem to be abstract nuances that are general for many usages. So Tyler and Evans 2003, The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning, and Cognition. 37: "native speakers of both English and Dutch tend to recognize relationships between distinct meanings associated with the same spatial particle." But Ugaritic, and apparently Tok Pisin likewise, shows that this does not need to be the case. Context can disambiguate a lot. | |
| Jan 31, 2018 at 8:30 | history | answered | b a | CC BY-SA 3.0 |