Re: Bi-objective Prepositions & betweeness.

On Fri, 2 Jan 2004 09:35:41 -0600, Caleb Hines <cph9fa@...> wrote:

>Anyone have any insights on this technique, know a better way to do it, or
>know of other prepositions that behave like this ('amongst' would probably
>be one). Also, are there any natlangs that might have a funny way to
>express 'between-ness'.
Well, when I first realized John Cowan's loglangy insight a few years ago, I
came up with the following:

pjaukra has two syntactically similar prepositions <der> 'between' and <nen>
'across, beyond, on the other side of' (if there are three things X Y Z in a
line, then Y is between X and Z, and Z is across Y from X).
Both of them only take one object: 'between X and Z' is rendered <der X ka
Z> 'between X from Z', and 'across Y from X' is rendered as, well, <nen Y ka
X> 'across Y from X'.  In both cases the 'from' part can be omitted, in
which case it is understood to be the location of the speaker, so <der X>
alone is 'between X and me, in front of X (from my perspective)'.  So <der X
an Y>, literally 'between X and Y', would be understood as 'in front of both
X and Y'.

Alex