Herman Miller wrote:
[snip]
> > plain-ACC. land-LOC. Shinar-GEN. in [they found it]
[snip]
> I think the second one is fine; it's clear enough that "in" goes with
> "land of Shinar" as a unit.
Although, with that you get a problem if the phrase is "In the plain in
the land of Shinar", then it would become "Plain-loc land-loc Shinar-gen
in in"! Probably why most languages with postpositions place the
phrases before the noun, and those with prepositions after. :-)
> I seem to remember that there's a general tendency for long modifiers
> like "in the land of Shinar" to follow the words they modify, but I
> don't know if that holds for verb-final languages in general (clearly it
> doesn't for Japanese in particular).
Probably not with adpositional phrases. Those would tend to prepose the
phrases to avoid confusion in nested phrases.
--
"There's no such thing as 'cool'. Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are." -
overheard
ICQ: 18656696
AIM Screen-Name: NikTaylor42