Re: Set of basic adpositions

On Sun, Nov 09, 2008 at 03:58:12PM +0000, R A Brown wrote:

> On page 87 of "Describing Morphosyntax", Thomas Payne wrote: "The set of
> basic adpositions in most languages is rather small, consisting of
> perhaps five or six forms."
>
> But he gave no examples or any indication what such a small set might
> consist of.
An overview of Japanese's restrictive set of postpositions can be found
in section 3.1 of this page:
http://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/mtg/members/bond/pubs/1998-als-spatial.html

He counts 11, which is more than I was expecting.  Some of them - "no",
"ni", and "de", which are arguably cases - seem to me to be vastly more
used than others.  A shower meditation on this state of affairs a couple
of years ago led me to speculate on what the meaning would be of a single
all-purpose adposition in a language that had only one.  I concluded that
such an animal would in fact be a relativization marker in a Tamil-like
verb-heavy language.

Amanda