preposition stranding etc.

[David Gil]

In response to Alan ...

> in its diachronic origin the Welsh
> construction probably began pretty much from where the modern Hebrew
system
> now is
>
> (where you cannot in any context say:
>
> (1)
> *alav hu
> on.him him
>
> (2)
> *bishvili ani
> for.me me
>
> or anything of the sort), but that is not true for modern Welsh.

Actually the Hebrew facts are a trifle more complex; while (1) is out in

probably any context, (2) sounds much less bad, with an emphatic meaning

assigned to the pronoun.  Though obviously, without the independent
pronoun
it's much more natural.  (The difference between (1) and (2) lies in the

preposition, not in the pronuon.)  But I agree with the main gist of
Alan's
comparison between Welsh and Hebrew.

> Jan Anward's Swedish examples are indeed good ones, but they also show
that
> we're dealing with a more general phenomenon which doesn't necessarily

> involve prepositions at all, cf. _Och du heter?_ etc.  By the way,
this can
> be done in Spanish too.  So the preposition is not an essential part
of the
> story in these cases, and again we seem to be getting rather far from
the
> subject of preposition stranding.

Well, except that in Hebrew and in Malay / Indonesian, the only examples
which
I can come up with seem to involve prepositions.  So my own impression
is that
prepositions provide for the "prototypical" instantiation of this
construction
type, even though in other languages it may generalize to other word
classes.

> As regards the Malay / Indonesian _-ka_ or _-kan_ problem, this may be

> related to a pattern that seems to pop up more or less sporadically
among
> Oceanic (Austronesian) languages, in which what may look like a
preposition
> at first, and may have got itself described by a grammarian as such,
turns
> out because of its syntactic behaviour to resemble somewhat the Somali

> items that started out this section of the discussion, with the
difference
> that the facts are somewhat more ambivalent for one reason or another,

> making it harder to decide how to categorize the item in question
> non-arbitrarily.  And then, if we were to ask whether any preposition
> stranding patterns can be identified in such a language, we are again
up
> against problems of definition.

Although I'm not usually accused of being overly sympathetic to
traditional
grammarians' descriptions of Malay / Indonesian, in the case at hand,
the
forms _ke_, _ka_ or _akan_ (depending on dialect) do behave very much
like
your typical European preposition.  So, to take one particular dialect
as an
example, Riau Indonesian has the preposition (or more accurately
proclitic)
_ke_ meaning "to", and also the enclitic _-kan_ with applicative and
causative
usages.  Historically they're related; synchronically however they're
quite
distinct.

David


--
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Inselstrasse 22
D-04103 Leipzig
Germany

tel:  49-341-9952310
fax:  49-341-9952119
email:  gil at eva.mpg.de
--
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Inselstrasse 22
D-04103 Leipzig
Germany

tel:  49-341-9952310
fax:  49-341-9952119
email:  gil at eva.mpg.de