Re: Bi-objective Prepositions & betweeness.

David Peterson wrote:
>    John wrote:
>
> << Loglangy insight: all of these compounds "unpack" to sentence
> conjunction:
> "This gift is from me and Carlene" means (to a first approximation, anyway)
> the same as "This gift is from me and this gift is from Carlene".
> But "Newark is between New York and Philadelphia" does not unpack to
> "*Newark is between New York and Newark is between Philadelphia".>>
>
> Astute insight.  Funny you should mention this, because I came across
> this very same problem yesterday with my pictlang.  What I ended up
> doing was a circumpreposition which I don't think would be quite
> realistic in a spoken language.  What it entails is a circumposition
> "between" which looks like < > (with determinatives, but we'll ignore
> those).  Then whatever's inside can be combined in various ways:
>
> (1 object) < buildings > = "between (the) buildings"
> (2 objects) < buildings trees > = "between (the) buildings and (the) trees"
In college I played around with a language inspired by HTML that used
circumpositions for nearly everything. Different kinds of phrases and
clauses were surrounded by paired particles, and these could be "nested"
(early on, verbs were like this too, surrounding their arguments. But I
couldn't decide whether transitive verbs should just be pairs with all
arguments between the halves, or groups of three parts with the subject
and object in different "compartments". I later settled on a syntax
inspired by LISP, with verbs as standalone words coming first in a list
surrounded by a clause-type particle pair). I abandoned it when I
realized that any non-trivial sentence would be absurdly long, and that
the grammar probably wouldn't survive the speaker correcting himself
midsentence.

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