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

Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:

> Andreas Johansson wrote:
>  > Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:
>  >
>  >
>  >>Andreas Johansson wrote:
> [snip]
>  >>>I was going to say I could easily imagine a supraposition, supposing my
>  >>>supposition as to meaning be correct, coming into existence from a
>  >>
>  >>postposition
>  >>
>  >>>first becoming asyllabic and then turning into a toneme - imagine a
>  >>
>  >>development
>  >>
>  >>>like _aba su_ > _abas_ > _abà_ where _aba_ is some noun and the grave
>  >>
>  >>is low
>  >>
>  >>>tone - but then it struck me if we discover such a beast in the wild,
>  >>
>  >>we would
>  >>
>  >>>likely call it a case-form, not an adpositional phrase, at least by
>  >>
>  >>the third
>  >>
>  >>>stage.
>  >>
>  >>I think by the second stage we surely have a suffix and, presumably,
>  >>some sort of case ending; so even at that stage it has IMO ceased to be
>  >>an adposition.
>  >
>  >
>  > That would depend on what we think of clitics, and whether the marker
> at the
>  > second stage can attach to a non-noun word at the end of a nominal
> phrase.
>
> Ah yes - clitics: "An item which exhibits behaviour intermediate between
> that of a word and that of an affix." [Trask]. Clitics add a certain
> fuzziness to the argument  :)
>
> 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."

> 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: Eldin has suggest the possibility, but
that's about all.

More interesting, surely, is Dryer's category of "inposition", for adpositions
that occur inside a noun phrase (but *not* inside one of the constitutive
words!). Whether we need a separate word for them is a judgement call, but it
seems clear enough to me they're conceptually different from pre/postposition
that strictly precede/follow their noun phrase.

 Andreas