Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ    Attic   

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

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Saturday, August 16, 2008, 20:27
Mark J. Reed wrote:
> But whence "fore"? It obviously is a morpheme meaning "front", as in > "forward" ("toward the fore"), "before", fore- ("forearm"), which is > still semiproductive in the meaning "pre-", but as a word on its own > it really has currency only in the nautical sense of "front (of a > ship)". I assume it originally meant "front" more generally. Was it > ever a body part word?
I should have been more specific about what I was trying to point out. The question I was replying to was originally: "Any adpositions, that is, that transparently share a root with an extant word of some other, large, open word-class, such as a noun, or verb, or adjective? Or maybe an adverb?" The part about "body part words" was an example that Jim Henry quoted from Payne's _Describing Morphosyntax_ answering this same question; I wasn't intending to imply that any of my examples were also "body part words".