> 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 The cites are to an unpublished dissertation by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
>