Re: terminology: prepositions, postpositions, and...

On Sat, 3 Nov 2007 14:57:30 +0100, Mr Veoler <veoler@...> wrote:
>Rick Harrison wrote:
>>Thanks to Mark and David for the replies. My bad for not searching the list
>>archives. This was briefly discussed in 2004 when Ray Brown said:
>>>In practice it is difficult to see how a 'inposition' is to be distinguished from
>>>an infix.
>>Which is a good point.
>Well, I imagine an inposition to be inside a noun phrase, maybe between the
>noun and adjective or something... While an infix is inside the noun itself.
>-Veoler
Right, that's also in the thread this year about prepositions in postpositional
languages and postpositions in prepositional languages.
< http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?
A2=ind0709C&L=CONLANG&P=R6956 >
and sequelae and prequelae.
It mentions a paper by Dryer,
<
http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/DryerWalsAdpNoMap.pd
f >
, in which Dryer defines an adposition; this definition requires that the
adposition be either an independent word or a clitic, and that its position be
determined syntactically rather than morphologically.
Dryer defines an "inposition" as an adposition which sometimes may be required
to be inserted within its object noun-phrase ("complement noun-phrase" is
Dryer's term).  For instance if it always has to be the second word, or always
has to be the penultimate word, then, if its complement NP contains more than
one word, it will be inserted into the NP.

Dryer's paper doesn't seem to say how many languages have inpositions, nor
how many they have; but it indicates that, in only a very few languages, are
inpositions the dominant type of adpositions.

Any infix wouldn't be counted as an inposition by Dryer; it would instead be a
case-infix for the noun or adjective, by Dryer's terminology.

Note Ray (and, I think maybe, others on this list as well?) doubt that Dryer (or
anyone we've heard about) has actually proven the need for a category
of "inposition" separate from those of prepositions and postpositions.