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

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

> 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.
Dryer's wording surely indicates that he considers it to be BOTH a clitic AND a
postposition.

> 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.
But nobody argues that suprapositions exist! I did not say that nobody as tried
looking for them, I said nobody has tried to make a case for such a category.

 Andreas

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