Re: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others)

Raymond Brown wrote:
>
> At 10:23 am -0400 16/6/00, John Cowan wrote:
> .....
> >I think that "here" (and "there" and "where") have both adverbial and
> >pronominal functions, without regard to which came from what.  The
> >parallelism between "here" and NPs seems too strong to ignore:
> >
> >        "It came from there."
> >        "From where?"
> >        "From the Black Lagoon!"
>
>  "Ça est venu de là."
>  "D'où?"
>  "De la Lagune Noire!"
>
> Does that make là and où substantives?
I disclaim knowledge of French grammar: after all, it was I who wanted to know when
you can say /ZdetEst/ and when you must say /ZladetEst/.  :-)

I was talking only about the English word "here" and its relatives.

> Indeed - English seems to me very much like Chinese in this respect; words
> can migrate fairly easily from one category to another.
Indeed, more so: Chinese does have a fairly sharp noun/verb distinction.

> And the question was: Who saying "here" was _originally_ an adverb?  OK -
> if it was originally a pronoun, where is the counter-evidence?
I think it is clear from cross-linguistic evidence that "here" etc. were
and are adverbs, but I think it is fair to say that they have substantive
use in English, unlike most English adverbs.

--

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@...>
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