Re: adjectival vs. adverbial prepositional phrases

Nathaniel wrote:

<<Of course, there are
also plenty of ambiguous examples like "I opened the presents under the
tree.">>

That's a good one, as far as ambiguity goes.   In my language Kamakawi, the
the ambiguity would remain, because that's one of the places where the
ambiguity in that languages lies.   [My quote: All languages have ambiguity,
but not all ambiguities are equal.]   So, "A mama ei ie nawa ie pala"   /(new
subject) (hug) (I) (predicate+def.) (fish) (in+def.) (house)/ could mean "I
hug the fish who is in the hosue" or "I, who am in the house, hug the fish".
 (Of course, due to the multifariousness of /i/, it could also mean, "I hug
the fish on behalf o the house.")   So that ambiguity remains.

For an example of a language where that ambiguity is resolved, take Zhyler
(from my quote below).   So if you want to say "I read the book in the
house", you have two options:

1.) /am.'SAr Ez.'dZez a.'mum/   (book-ACC. house-INESS. read-PRES.-1sg.)
[Note placement of the house phrase, and the stress.]

2.) /'ez.dZEz am.'SAr a.'mum/   (house-INESS.-ADJ. book-ACC. read-PRES.-1sg.)

So the difference is that in phrase 1, the "in the house" part comes right
before verb, because that's what it modifies--i.e., it describes the manner
or the place in which the action took place.   In this case, the action is a
person reading, so it describes where that reading took place.   And, regular
stress in Zhyler is word-finally.

In sentence two, though, the "in the house" part comes before "the book",
because it's describing where the book is.   Also, it becomes an adjective,
and adjectives are the sole exception to the stress rule in Zhyler,
adjectives taking penultimate stress (stress shift is a common way of deriv
ing adjectives from nouns).   Also, only stress vowels are tense, so /E/ >
[e].   So three changes: stress, vowel quality, and placement.   But it
resolves the ambiguity.   (There is ambiguity in other places.)   [Man, I
hate to throw this in here, but in the pregame shows for the baseball
playoffs, they've been playing some awesome music for the Angels (my team;
I'm from Orange County)!   Once they played Led Zeppelin's "Hot Dog"--very
obscure, excellent.   And just right now they were playing "Peace Frog" by
the Doors!   How 'bout that...]

If you wanted to really stress the idea of "I" (the speaker) being in the
house, you could drag out a pronoun (usually for first person, you just get a
suffix on the verb).   So that'd be:

/'ez.dZEz mA am.'SAr am/ (only change is /mA/ is 1sg pronoun, and the verb,
then, loses the 1sg ending)

And that'd translate as something like, "While I was in the house, I read a
book", or something, but it'd be kind of weird to say that.   This language
doesn't like pronouns, and avoids them wherever possible.

-David

"imDeziZejDekp2wilDez ZejDekkinel..."
"You can celebrate anything you want..."
               -John Lennon