Re: Prepositional adjectives?

Sam Bryant wrote:
>
> In my current conlang, I've opted against prepositions in favor of what seem to
> be transitive adjectives
[snip]
> metto asta celo: si:.
> mother-FEM-NOM-SG  beyond-FEM-NOM-SG wall-MASC-LOC-SG is-3S-PRES-INDIC.
> "the mother is beyond the wall."
[snip]
> What should I call these? I'm leaning towards "prepositional adjectives", but I
> really have no idea.
Very interesting idea.  I wish I'd thought of that.  :-)  I'd call them
some kind of preposition.  Adjectival prepositions?  Agreeing
prepositions?  They seem, to me, to really be prepositions that happen
to agree with what they modify.  But, I suppose you could also make the
argument that they really are adjectives which replace prepositions, as
you said.  Perhaps these could've evolved (or at least some of them)
from genuine adjectives that took modifiers, thus in your example,
perhaps in an earlier stage, _asta_ meant something like "distant", so
that it was something like "the mother distant from the wall is".
Perhaps other prepositions then began to agree with the modified noun by
analogy.

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