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

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 8:17 PM, Eldin Raigmore
<eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
> Are there, in any natlangs, any synchronously-derived adpositions?
"[I]n English, the phrase 'on top of' is a complex preposition
consisting partly of the noun 'top'.  For many languages
prepositions come from body-part nouns, e.g. 'back'
for 'behind', 'face' for 'in front', 'head' for 'up', and 'foot'
for 'down' (Casad 1982, Heine and Re 1984)....."

Thomas Payne, _Describing Morphosyntax_, p. 87

The cites are to an unpublished dissertation by
Eugene Casad, and to:

Heine, Bernd and Mechthild Reh.  1984.  Grammaticalization
and Reanalysis in African Languages.  Hamburg: Helmut Buske.

French also forms phrasal postpositions like "au bout de";
I'll leave it to the native speakers on the list to say whether
those are, phonologically, compound words, or phrases
as they are represented in orthography.  It seems to me
that Payne is right in saying that at least some phrases
like "on top of" in English are phonologically compound
words although represented as phrases in the orthography.

--
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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