Re: THEORY: Adpositional Heads

In Japanese and in Chinese--a language I don't speak so feel free to
correct--some adpositions are verbs and others are nouns.
The verb tei (?) wich, from what I gather, is used as a preposition as an
accusative (?) marker comes before the noun it tags: tei+noun. The noun is
its object.
The noun adposition zhang (?) "the above part" comes after the noun, which
is like its genitive: table+zhang "the table's above_part" = "on the table".
So what is defining/determining what? Zhang syntactically "defines" the role
of table in the main phrase, but semantically table is the genitive
"determining" zhang :-))))))

This of course results in a further question: is there a "zero clitic"
before "tei" or after "zhang" like there are "zero copulae" in nominal
phrases? ;-)
Take the Japanese counterpart of that system: "tsukue (no koto) ni tsuite":
"regarding the table". "Tsuite" is a verb (tsuku) so the "adposition" is a
verb and the table is its oblique object. But the verbal ending is specific,
although not exclusively used as adpositional. Then "tsukue no ue ni": "on
the table": "ue" is the noun "the above_part" and "tsukue" is a noun with a
genitive clitic "no", but there is still a locative clitic "ni" after "ue".
So what is the "adposition" universal stuff here? The clitic? the noun+the
clitic? The verb ending? The verb + its ending? Same with S, V and O. What
do you do with Papuan langs that scatter the bits of their compound verbs
all along the sentence? For my conlang I use the following logics with
adpositions deriving from nouns:

I talk. The table is the Topic (of my talking).
I talk (circumstancial adposition) Topic is the table.

I talk. I am in Front of the table.
I talk (circumstancial adposition) Front of the table.

So I have three adpositions: one is circumstancial introducing Topic and
Front and the two other ones qualify the nouns Topic and Front: one is
expletive ("is"--but reverse of equative) and one is genitive (of). In
Japanese the genitive "no" is used for both, which is sometimes confusing:
"X tame (ni)" means both "because of X" or "in order to X" (actually the
first usually drops the clitic "ni").


Rob Haden <magwich78@...> wrote:
Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...> wrote:
>Well, as I recall, the head is defined as the word that defines what the
>phrase is.  I.e., a verb defines a verb phrase, a noun defines a noun
>phrase, hence, an adposition defines an adpositional phrase.
Good point.  However, I wonder if one could re-interpret adpositional
phrases as noun phrases?
- Rob