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Re: Derived adpositions (< Linguistic term for ease of changing word-class)

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
Date:Tuesday, August 12, 2008, 0:41
On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 4:51 PM, Dana Nutter <li_sasxsek@...> wrote:
>> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Jim Henry
> http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/conlang13/grammar-p1.htm >> >> I'm not sure yet what it would mean to convert an entity or >> quality root into a preposition.
> 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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Dana Nutter <li_sasxsek@...>