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

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

> Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > Quoting R A Brown <ray@...>:
> [snip]
> >>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.
> >
> > Dryer's wording surely indicates that he considers it to be BOTH a clitic
> AND a
> > postposition.
>
> I've just re-read the opening part Dryer's paper again and while he well
> consider _'s_ to be a clitic, he does not treat it as an adposition in
> his paper and, therefore, not as a postposition. I quote:
> "A word is treated here as an adposition (preposition or postposition)
> if it combines with a noun phrase and indicates the grammatical or
> semantic relationship of that noun phrase to the verb in the clause."
Read also the following sentence:

"Some languages also employ adpositions to indicate a relationship
of a noun phrase to a noun (especially in a genitive/possessive
relationship); however, if the only candidates in a language for
adpositions are in the genitive construction, they are not treated as
adpositions here."

Such beasts are not the subject of the paper, but he clearly does consider them
adpositions.

But the specifical instance of English _'s_ is somewhat besides the point, which
is that Dryer doesn't see clitic and adposition as mutually exlusive categories.

                     Andreas