Re: Derived adpositions (< Linguistic term for ease of changing word-class)
| From: | Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, August 12, 2008, 0:41 |
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On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 4:51 PM, Dana Nutter <li_sasxsek@...> wrote:
>> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Jim Henry
> I have derived prepositions in Sasxsek. The suffix "-u" makes a
> lexical into a preposition.
Only one of these is relevant to the issue with säb zjeda.
Others are concepts that are/would be lexicalized
in säb zjeda by a relationship or process root anyway.
But:
> bon = good
> bonu = for the benefit of; for the sake of
> (benefactive)
This makes sense; I could generalize that and say
that a quality root > preposition transformation makes
a prep. meaning "object of prep. has this quality with
respect to the head of the prep. phrase". It might
not work with all qualities/adjectives, but it would
work with a fair subset, I reckon.
At present I have the benefactive preposition derived
from a process root for "help".
That still leaves me with one transformation out of 20
(entity root > preposition) that doesn't seem to make
any sense. Note that some concepts that would be noun
roots in other languages are relationship/preposition roots
in säb zjeda, -- kinship terms for instance. Nouns for
persons in such relationships to other persons are
derived from the root preposition. All entity roots
describe concepts that don't have an inherent
relationship to some other entity. (E.g., "father/mother of"
is a preposition root, "person" a noun root.)
I guess I could kludge in something like " [obj of prep] is
treated like/considered as [entity] by
[head of prep phrase]", just to avoid having a
gap in the system, but I don't like it.
--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article
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