Re: Syntactic Differentiation of Adverbial vs. Adjectival Adpositions

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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