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Re: Syntactic Differentiation of Adverbial vs. Adjectival Adpositions

From:Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...>
Date:Friday, September 5, 2008, 17:52
On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 1:08 PM, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 12:44 PM, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote: >> Logan Kearsley 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; >> >> Quite likely, tho I can't think of one immediately. But Classical Latin >> certainly makes a distinction. In CL prepositional phrases may be used only >> adverbially. > > Not quite the same thing, I think. In that case, there's only one > semantic class, and it does only one thing- modifying verbs; applying > the same meaning to a noun requires some circumlocution to put a > convenient extra verb in the way. It still avoids the ambiguity that > arises in English from having a single semantic class that does two > things, but it's different from having two distinct classes that each > do one thing.
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". -l.

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