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Re: adjectival vs. adverbial prepositional phrases

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Monday, October 14, 2002, 19:56
En réponse à "Nathaniel G. Lew" <natlew@...>:

> > Aren't we dealing with two different but related grammatical concepts > here? >
Depends on the language. While English still has some prepositions specialised in adverbial or adjectival use, and Spanish on the other hand separates both uses completely, French does the exact opposite: any preposition can be used as well to make adjectival phrases as well as adverbial phrases. It's the main way in French to make expressions corresponding to compound words in English. When ambiguity can arise, it just stays there, and we don't seem to find it so bad ;))) .
> > Has anyone else addressed this problem in their projects? What > solutions > you have come up with. >
Most of my languages completely separate both uses, but with different ways to do it. The nicest one until now is Moten, which uses overdeclination to transform an adverbial phrase into an adjectival phrase. The example I usually use is the following one: |fuli| means "gold". With the instrumental prefix |ko-|, you get the adverbial phrase |kofuli|: "(made) with gold". By overdeclining this phrase in the genitive case, you can transform this phrase into an adjectival phrase which can complete any noun: |kofulvi zanej|: "a ring made in gold", "a golden ring". Any adverbial phrase can be changed into an adjectival phrase like that. Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.