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Syntactic Differentiation of Adverbial vs. Adjectival Adpositions

From:Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...>
Date:Friday, September 5, 2008, 15:57
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.

Replies

R A Brown <ray@...>
taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...>
Larry Sulky <larrysulky@...>
Carsten Becker <carbeck@...>
caeruleancentaur <caeruleancentaur@...>
Damátir Ando <rodkaromanovich@...>