Re: inalienable possession

[some snippage]

On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Tim Smith wrote:

> At 02:18 PM 11/20/98 -0500, Nik Taylor wrote:
> >charles wrote:
> >> I've been thinking of using active and passive participles
> >> to replace all prepositions. Is that possible in natlangs?
> >adpositions.  Words like "top" lose their nominal/verbal quality and
> >become purely adpositional, but there are languages with only one or two
> >generic prepositions, it's just that that's probably only a temporary
> >condition, after a while, noun/verb phrases evolve into full-blown
> >adpositions.
> A few months ago, I posted a rough sketch of a grammar in which all
> adpositions are replaced by verbs, and in place of adpositional phrases
> there are several kinds of serial verb constructions with switch-reference
> marking.  I still find this idea very interesting and intend to work it out
> in more detail someday.
I have found it impossible to merge "transitive adverbs" with
"adjective participles" because I need them both after all.
Except for nouns, which have zero "valency", everything else
is verb-like; adjective/statives take 1 argument noun,
transitive verbs 2, transitive adverbs (prepositions) 2 as well.

I prefer breaking di-transitive verbs into verb + adverb.
It never seems right to me to have random unclassed "particles"
floating around doing magical arbitrary things.