Re: Adjectives, Adverbs, Ad...

On Monday, March 15, 2004, at 03:08 PM, Carsten Becker wrote:

> Thanks for that comprehensive answer, Ray!
[snip]
>> In our modern modern usage, we restrict 'noun' to the first group
> only,
>> and simply call the second group adjectives.
>
Good, bad, big, little, red, blue, hot, cold, warm, serious, frivolous etc.

Guess I couldn't have explained myself clearly.

[snip]
>> Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
>
> I did not want to boil it all down to adadadadadadadadnouns! Actually, I
> just wanted to ask if it there could be other ad... things that describe
> other parts of speech, such as ?adconjuction, ?adpreposition for
> example.
I think 'modify' might better describe the role of adverb vis-a-vis verb,
adjective or another adverb. It's difficult to see how a conjunction can
be modified.

Prepositions might appear to be modified in, e.g. "Has it gone right into
the ground?" "Nope, it's only halfway in the hole" etc. But the
traditional explanation is that the adverbs "right" and "half-way" are
modifying other adverbs here, i.e. the phrases "into the ground" and "in
the hole" function as adverbs. Indeed, we were taught in the 50s that they
were "adverbial phrases"; the modern terminology seems to be
"prepositional phrase", naming the phrase by the word introducing it and
not by its function.

But the division between preposition (or adposition) and adverb is not
clean cut. In the earliest Greek, what later came to be regarded as
'prepositions' are still adverbs that loosely attach themselves to noun
cases; they may be separated a little way from the noun either before it
or after it. Eventually they settle down next to the noun, usually in
front of it tho occasionally, particular in verse, they follow it (with
change of accent).

And as the thread on adpositionless languages shows, the category
'preposition' or 'adposition' is not by any means universal.

When it comes to the minutiae of a language's grammar, there may well be
more than one possible analysis and I've no doubt that in certain
circumstances a person could make out a case for *apprepositions or
whatever. Whether that would help or hinder understanding would be
debatable.

Personally, I would not happily except such a category unless it could be
shown that such a category was needed and provided a neater analysis.

Occam's razor is still a good principle IMO.

Ray
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