Re: THEORY: Xpositions in Ypositional languages {X,Y}={pre,post}

Jeff Rollin wrote:
[snip]
> You can go too far, of course.
Amen!

> For example, suppose a language has nouns with
> a "normal case" and a "construct case", where e.g. the normal case of "beit"
> means "house" and the construct case "bet" means "house of" (yes, this is
> inspired by Semitic). Would the lack of an "i" in the construct case qualify
> as a "minus-" or "teleposition" (where "minus-" or "tele-" means "take away"?
> I think not!
I think not also. IMO 'suprapositions' and 'transpositions' are likewise
going too far; my own feeling, as I've written before, is that Dryer's
examples of so-called 'inpositions' are not convincing. Unless I find
any convincing arguments otherwise, at the moment I do not think that
any of these three animals actually exist in natlangs.

Now if someone wants to experiment with one or more of these categories
in a _conlang_, that's another matter. IMO one reason for conlanging is
to experiment with different structures, e.g. Jeffrey Henning's 'Fith'
or R. Srikanth's 'Lin' inter_alia.
--------------------------------------

Andreas Johansson wrote:
 > Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:
[snip]
 >>Ill amend my comment above: "I think by the second stage we surely have
 >>a suffix or, at least, a clitic; so even at that stage it has IMO ceased
 >>to be an adposition."
 >
 > Dryer would here no doubt protest that a clitic indicating the case
role of a
 > nominal phrase *is* an adposition. Op. cit:
 >
 > "Such clitic case markers, which attach to modifiers of the noun if
 > they are at the beginning or end of the noun phrase, are treated here
 > as instances of adpositions since they combine syntactically with
 > noun phrases, even though they are not separate phonological words."

Which must surely mean that Dryer considers _'s_ in "The guy next door's
wife" to be a postposition; but it's generally considered to be clitic.

But as I have written before, the border-line between adpositions &
clitics is fuzzy. I think whether a case marker is considered to be an
adposition, a clitic or an affix must surely depend upon the structure
of the language concerned and its phonotactics. But even conceding
Dryer's argument as a universal truth, I still am of the opinion that .....

 >>The point is that I do not think a case has been made for a separate
 >>category of 'supraposition'.
 >
 >
 > I don't know if anybody has really tried:

But surely in view of the amount of linguistic analysis that has gone on
over the past two centuries, and especially during the last one, surely
if such a beast as a 'supraposition' exists it would have been spotted
by someone. That fact it will need someone to *try* and spot it seems to
me to re-enforce my point that defining a category of 'supraposition' as
distinct from 'suprafix' will require some pedantic sleight of hand,
i.e. IMO multiplying entities unnecessarily.

--
Ray
==================================
ray@carolandray.plus.com
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Entia non sunt multiplicanda
praeter necessitudinem.

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