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

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

> Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > Quoting Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...>:
> [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.

By no coincidence, the marker at the 2nd stage takes the same form - ie. /-s/ -
as the Swedish genitival marker, which is commonly refered to as case ending,
but isn't necessarily appended to the relevant noun: it is attached to the last
word of the nominal phrase, which might be almost anything. Among the more
exotic possibilities is to a stranded preposition of an embedded relative
clause, eg _killen jag åt lunch meds bil_ "the car of the guy I ate lunch with",
 where _meds_ is the preposition _med_ "with" + the genitival marker. Viewed as
syntactical unit, this surely behaves more like a postposition than a case
suffix.

Oh well. Tomorrow I'll get around to actually reading Dryer's paper and perhaps
contribute more productively.

 Andreas

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