Re: Syntactic Differentiation of Adverbial vs. Adjectival Adpositions

Logan Kearsley writes:
>
> Additional thought- how common is it to have
> adpositional phrases which can behave adjectivally
> at all? English has a habit of eliding lots of
> grammatical information like complementizers and
> relative pronouns and copulas in relative clauses,
> and so it just occurred to me that every instance
> of a prepositional phrase modifying a noun, like
> "the fruit on the table", could be explained as a
> relative clause that's been heavily elided- "the
> fruit [which is] on the table".

Good question. In English, participles usually come
before the noun. "I ate the stolen fruit." But if
there is more to the participle, it comes after: "I
ate the fruit stolen by my uncle." This could be
taken as an ellipsis of "I ate the fruit which was
stolen by my uncle."

Usually I see this in Esperanto as well: "Mi mangxis
la frukton sxtelitan de mia onklo." But in books
by Scandinavian authors, the phrase is commonly
placed in front: "Mi mangxis la sxtelitan de mia
onklo frukton."

 --Ph. D.