Re: adjectival vs. adverbial prepositional phrases

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

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