Re: Syntactic Differentiation of Adverbial vs. Adjectival Adpositions

---In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...>
>wrote:
>[snip]
>Additional thought- how common is it to have adpositional phrases
>which can behave adjectivally at all?
Almost every language has at least one "case" in which the thus-"cased" noun
modifies another noun; in other words, a lexical-or-syntactic-or-morphological-
or-combination-of-those way to make a noun act like an adjective.

Almost all grammarians of such languages call at least one
such "case" "genitive".

Either that "case" actually is a case (shown by morphology of the noun), or it
is shown by an adposition (a lexical solution), or it is shown by some kind of
syntactic means; often a combination of two or three (a case and an
adposition, or a case and juxtaposition/word-order, or an adposition and
juxtaposition/word-order).

When writing grammars for languages that have more than one adnominal
case, sometimes linguists just call them "First Genitive, Second Genitive, ...
etc.".

But the "partitive case", in languages that have one, is often also an
adnominal case.

--------------------------------

Some languages, in instances where one noun is an attribute of another, mark
the head-noun instead of the attributive noun; the head-noun goes in "the
construct state".  In particular some Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, don't
mark the possessor, but instead mark the thing possessed.

But I'll bet Hebrew still has some adnominal case(s) or other.

>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".
English's genitives are usually shown by the preposition "of".  In case the
meaning of the genitive is "possessive", they're often shown by the suffix "'s"
(the "Saxon genitive").

For other "adnominal" prepositional phrases, though, I think your explanation is
probably correrct.

>-l.