Re: Syntactic Differentiation of Adverbial vs. Adjectival Adpositions

On Fri, 5 Sep 2008 11:57:34 -0400, Logan Kearsley
<chronosurfer@...> wrote:
>
> Consider the sentence "I ate the fruit on the table."
> In English, this is structurally ambiguous, because the prepositional
> phrase can apply to the verb or a noun- did I eat fruit which was on
> the table, or did I eat the fruit while I was on the table?
> I think someone mentioned a conlang that has a semantic distinction
> between adverbial and adjectival prepositions; that would be
> interesting to investigate. But what about using different syntax to
> distinguish the two cases? Say, prepositions as noun-modifiers, and
> postpositions as verb-modifiers (or vice-versa)?
>
> Then the case where the fruit was on the table before I ate it would be
> "I ate the fruit on the table",
> whereas the case where I ate the fruit while I was on the table would be
> "I ate the fruit the table on" /
> "I the table on ate the fruit".
>
> -l.
I've never tried your idea, although that has absolutely no bearing on whether
it's been done/it occurs in natlangs. :)

Most of the time the adverbial/adjectival distinction is made in my conlangs,
morphology is used. For example, if the prepositional phrase is used as an
adjective, the preposition takes the same agreement (any of gender, number,
case) that an adjective takes.

In klop, I do use syntax, though. There are no adjectives or prepositions
(these are replaced by verbs). Relative clauses are used for noun-modifiers
and small clauses or adverbial clauses for verb-modifiers. Examples (using
glosses etc.):

k>a eat fruit r>a on table. (adjectival; r = relative pronoun)
k>a eat fruit k>a on table. (secondary; k = speaker(s) in this case)
(a means the phrase is anaphoric, > is direct voice)

Jeff