[Lingtyp] complex postpositions

Sun Feb 3 15:39:19 UTC 2019

In the Cariban family, there is a small set of monomorphemic postpositions, with all the rest formed from relational nouns plus suffixes expressing static location or path (allative, perlative, ablative). Derbyshire (1985: 205-219) gives a long list of nouns plus case suffixes (his "Relator forms”) and Meira (1999: 399-411) gives quite a few examples of what he calls “derived postpositions” in Cariban language Tiriyó. Derbyshire (1999: 42-43) gives a first indication of the comparative system, but limits his examples to 15 postpositions in four languages.

In work in progress, my student Jordan Douglas has identified over 100 postposition cognate sets in the family, of which the great majority reconstruct as composed from a (possessed) relational noun stem plus a postpositional suffix. If you want more information, write to me directly.

Best,
Spike

Derbyshire, Desmond C. 1999. Carib. The Amazonian Languages. Ed. by Dixon, R.M.W., & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Derbyshire, Desmond C. 1985. Hixkaryana and Linguistic Typology. Dallas: University of Texas at
Arlington and the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Meira, Sérgio. 1999. A Grammar of Tiriyó. Houston: Rice University Doctoral Dissertation.

On Feb 3, 2019, at 6:33 AM, LIU Danqing <liudanq at yahoo.com<mailto:liudanq at yahoo.com>> wrote:

Dear Colleagues:

  The complex adpositions in Chinese basically exist in the form of circumpositions, with a preposition denoting thematic roles and a postposition conveying locative information. For instance:

Mandarin: wo  zai shu-shang xie-zi
          I    at book-on   write-characters

In some cases, the preposition is optional while the postposition is obligatory. So the circumposition is a temporary combination instead of a lexical item. Most postpositions came from locative relational nouns.

There are several circumpositions which denote relations other than spatial ones. For example:

    Ta gen huli shide jiaohua.
    He with fox-like   sly

In my book published  in Chinese, Word Order Typology and Adposition Theories (2003), I offered a detailed description regarding adpositions in Mandarin and a number of Wu dialects including Shanghainese. There are a Japanese edition published in Japan and a Korean edition published in Korea, but no English edition, yet. I'm sorry for that.

Danny Liu

On Sunday, February 3, 2019, 9:51:55 PM GMT+8, Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:

It seems to me that the great majority of languages have „complex adpositions“ of the Japanese type, i.e. noun-like forms which combine with their complements in an adpossessive-like way (either genitive flagging on the complement, or indexing on the „adposition“, or both).

Peter Svenonius has coined the term „axial“ for such forms (as mentioned by Anders Holmberg), which seems a nice addition to our terminology - these axial nouns typically mean ‚in front/in back‘, ‚above/below‘, and ‚inside/outside‘ (true, only the first two are axes in the strict sense).

In European languages, one usually finds non-axials (i.e. non-noun-like prepositions) for such notions - including some „complex adverbial prepositions“ (e.g. French au dessus de ‚above‘), but I would venture the following claim:

Outside of Europe, spatial relations of the type ‚front/above/inside’ are almost always expressed by axial nouns.

There is surprisingly little systematic cross-linguistic research on axials, so this is just my impression (there was a 1993 book by Soteria Svorou, but it focused on semantic developments, not on morphosyntax).

Best,
Martin

Am 03.02.2019 um 14:20 schrieb Alice Vittrant- Villejuif <vittrant at vjf.cnrs.fr<mailto:vittrant at vjf.cnrs.fr>>:

Dear Nigel,

This kind of complex appositions is related to the Relator Nouns issue (or 'Noms de Localisation Interne’ issue). See for instance Delancey 1997, Aurnague 1989, 1996, Aurnague & al 2000 and Borillo 1988 (in french).
They are quite frequent in Southeast Asian languages. See for instance Burmese and Thaï chapters in Vittrant & Watkins (eds)(2019).

Best,
Alice

-----

DeLancey, Scott. « Grammaticalization and the Gradience of Categories : Relator Nouns and Postpositions in Tibetan and Burmese ». In Essays on language function and language type: dedicated to T. Givón, édité par Joan L. Bybee, John Haiman, et Sandra A. Thompson, Johns Benjamins., 51‑69. Amsterdam, 1997.

Borillo, Andrée. « Le lexique de l’espace : les noms et les adjectifs de localisation interne ». Cahiers de Grammaire 13 (1988): 1‑22.

Aurnague, Michel. 1989. Catégorisation des objets dans le langage: Les noms et les adjectifs de localisation interne. Cahiers de Grammaire 14. 1–21. Toulouse: UTM.

Aurnague, Michel. « Les Noms de Localisation Interne: tentative de caractérisation sémantique à partir de données du basque et du français ». Cahiers de Lexicologie 69 (1996): 159‑92.

Aurnague, M., K. Boulanouar, J.-L. Nespoulous, A. Borillo & M. Borillo. 2000. Spatial semantics:the processing of Internal Localization Nouns. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive/ Current Psychology of Cognition 19 (1). 69–110.

Vittrant, Alice, et Justin Watkins, eds. The Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 314. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2019.

Le 2 févr. 2019 à 21:57, Nigel Vincent <nigel.vincent at MANCHESTER.AC.UK<mailto:nigel.vincent at manchester.ac.uk>> a écrit :

There is a substantial literature on prepositions and postpositions. There is also a growing body of work on complex prepositions, i.e. things like English 'in front of', French 'au dessous de'. To complete the picture I'd be grateful for pointers to studies and/or examples of complex postpositions.
Thanks in advance
Nigel

Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA MAE
Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
The University of Manchester

Linguistics & English Language
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
The University of Manchester

https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/researchers/nigel-vincent(f973a991-8ece-453e-abc5-3ca198c869dc).html
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-------------------
Alice Vittrant
Université d'Aix-Marseille / CNRS-DDL (UMR 5596)

alice.vittrant at univ-amu.fr<mailto:alice.vittrant at univ-amu.fr>
alice.vittrant at cnrs.fr<mailto:alice.vittrant at cnrs.fr>

Site personnel :
http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/AliceVittrant
https://univ-amu.academia.edu/AliceVittrant

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