Re: Syntactic Differentiation of Adverbial vs. Adjectival Adpositions

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.

>>  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".
>
> I see; adpositional phrases use a preposition if they function adverbially
> but a postposition if they function adjectivally. Interesting idea - somehow
> I doubt that any natlang works like that - but you newer know with ANADEW
>    ;)
There are natlangs with mixed adpositional systems, aren't there? I
wonder what else they'd be used for....
I started contemplating altering one of my conlangs to use this sort
of system (it would be a great post-fact historical explanation for
why a few irregular features are the way they are), but I have a
nagging feeling that it could result in different ambiguity as to
which noun is supposed the object of an adposition; I haven't been
able to think of a good example yet, but then I've only been thinking
about it for a few hours while doing other things. I expect that sort
of ambiguity could be reduced with an appropriate case system, but of
course I can't check that until an example of ambiguity to play with.

-l.

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