Counting adpositions

[zelos]

A quick question, what is the largest quantity of adpositions found in a natural language?

[Radius Solis]

Nobody knows because languages with large numbers of adpositions tend to have any number of morphemes or morpheme strings that are partially but not entirely adposition-like, and do you count them all, or some of them, or only the really obviously adpositional ones, or what? English is no exception. I have sometimes heard English cited as a language unusually rich in basic prepositions, and some people may not appreciate just how rich it is until they consult a list, but at the same time I have also never heard any sort of claim that English, or any other language, has the most.

[linguoboy]

Why does it matter?

[Miekko]

Why does it matter?

The information we would get by hearing such a number would really be useful and informative - it would inform us exactly how many adpositions the most inclusive way of counting them reaches for the language which gives the highest number with that method. A highly informative factoid indeed, and something I have a hard time seeing how linguists can sleep without knowing.

[ol bofosh]

I saw Wiki's list of English prepositions, my mouth fell open, having seen the neat list of Spanish ones first.

Is there a good list to show basic adposition concepts? (if there is any such thing as "basic concepts")

[Miekko]

I saw Wiki's list of English prepositions, my mouth fell open, having seen the neat list of Spanish ones first.

Is there a good list to show basic adposition concepts? (if there is any such thing as "basic concepts")

no. there isn't.

[ol bofosh]

Oh poo. Well, I'll just carrying on looking through the Spanish prepositions and there various uses and a useful list of cases from Wiki that hint a lot at useful concepts.

And then I'll come up with my own list of "basic adposition concepts"

[Miekko]

Oh poo. Well, I'll just carrying on looking through the Spanish prepositions and there various uses and a useful list of cases from Wiki that hint a lot at useful concepts.

And then I'll come up with my own list of "basic adposition concepts"

Wikipedia's list of adpositions and cases basically is shit for learning linguistics.

If you find something like
"Latin has
- nominative
- accusative
- genitive
- ablative
- dative
- vocative
- elephant"

this doesn't tell you anything about the cases it has. It doesn't tell you what it does with the genitive (hint: it's not just for marking the possessor!), it doesn't tell you what it does with the ablative (hint: it's not just for marking the geographical source of a movement), it doesn't tell you what it does with elephant, and it doesn't tell you where you can expect finding the dative either.

The list of spanish prepositions is a bit better than that, but not by much. Sorry, your methodology is not good. Go learn a few languages well enough, and you'll see my point.

[ol bofosh]

I'm being wary of the difference between a prepositional word and what it can be used for (what I mean by "concept"). I want to avoid directly translating an adposition form anywhere, and instead look at the "basic concepts"(=use of)

So far, in Alahithian, I have a few postpositions for position, motion and time, and now looking into manner, and seeing how they can/could overlap.

[Miekko]

I'm being wary of the difference between a prepositional word and what it can be used for (what I mean by "concept"). I want to avoid directly translating an adposition form anywhere, and instead look at the "basic concepts"(=use of)

What the fuck is a "basic concept of", then? Please, explain what that is.

[linguoboy]

I'm being wary of the difference between a prepositional word and what it can be used for (what I mean by "concept"). I want to avoid directly translating an adposition form anywhere, and instead look at the "basic concepts"(=use of)

What the fuck is a "basic concept of", then? Please, explain what that is.

Shouldn't cognitive linguistics have some reasonable answers to this?

[Basilius]

A quick question, what is the largest quantity of adpositions found in a natural language?

The question kinda implies that every language has a fixed list of adpositions.

But this is questionable.

Do you count derived items like besides, during or despite as prepositions in English?
More transparently derived ones, like including or above?
Do you count set phrases that include other prepositions, like e. g. due to, compared with or in front of?
Do you include less lexicalized phrases like within the sight of?
Phrases that aren't lexicalized at all, like contrary to his apparently controversial hypothesis about?

Adpositions are just a way to specify some semantics associated with the connection of words; the types of semantic relations to be specified are innumerable; what languages do is pick some frequent relations to be (formally!) treated as "basic" and assign them to cases and primary adpositions. These can be counted, but there needn't be a sharp divide between them and all the derived types. Counting will be a conventional thing anyway.

[Niedokonany]

I'm being wary of the difference between a prepositional word and what it can be used for (what I mean by "concept"). I want to avoid directly translating an adposition form anywhere, and instead look at the "basic concepts"(=use of)

What the fuck is a "basic concept of", then? Please, explain what that is.

Shouldn't cognitive linguistics have some reasonable answers to this?

There's the notion of "semantic primes" that you can read about if you wish. I remain unconviced that acquisiton of the primes is somehow fundamentally different that the acquisition of the rest of vocabulary, or at least that the acquisition of the rest of vocabulary doesn't share a certain part with the acquisition of the primes but then I haven't actually read much about this framework. After all, does a dictionary definiton (especially composed of a string of the purported primes) give you a full idea how the word is used?

[ol bofosh]

What the fuck is a "basic concept of", then? Please, explain what that is.

I wonder why I put things in brackets. I mean:

"basic concepts"=use of

To be more specific, a word like "by" has several uses. One meaning next to or near, and another meaning that something was made or done by someone. And probably others.

In Spanish, the latter concept is represented by por as in pinturas por Gaudí. But por can usually be translated to English "for", and "paintings for Gaudí" is different from "paintings by Gaudí". I know someone who will say - in English - "take pictures to things" (tomar fotos a cosas) where they actually mean taking photos of things.I'm sure I must do similar mistakes in Spanish

You actually explained it yourself:

this doesn't tell you anything about the cases it has. It doesn't tell you what it does with the genitive (hint: it's not just for marking the possessor!), it doesn't tell you what it does with the ablative (hint: it's not just for marking the geographical source of a movement), it doesn't tell you what it does with elephant, and it doesn't tell you where you can expect finding the dative either.

Shouldn't cognitive linguistics have some reasonable answers to this?

Really? How?

[Radius Solis]

It is also worth noting that adpositions do not always have "meanings" like ours do. Denoting a relationship is not the core function of an adposition! Extremely common, of course, but it is secondary to marking syntactic dependency. Some languages have adpositions that carry no relationship meaning at all, they exist purely as dependent-izing particles, and information about the specific relationship is indicated in other ways or left to the hearer to understand from context. Such languages would tend to have only a single adposition. Others have only two or three, which carry meanings, but extremely broad and generalized ones. There's a whole region of the Amazon where the languages tend to have only two adpositions, and they can basically be translated "with" and "without" - but the first includes meanings like "to", "from", "at", "inside", "near", "having to do with", and the other includes meanings like "for", "because", "outside of", "not including", "far from", and so forth. In these languages, IIRC, verbs of position and motion do the rest of the work. (I stole this setup for Jamna Kopiai.)

[ol bofosh]

Fascinating stuff Radius.

I did notice the difference in phrasal verbs (not prepositions as such, but they make us of them) and how one verb can be changed into different verbs. Something I didn't notice until I looked at a Spanish-English dictionary.

I still don't know the uses of the Spanish verbs, I'm learning them mainly through exposure to their uses, rather than memorising what a dictionary has to say about the Spanish a (although it is interesting to read about).

[Niedokonany]

Such languages would tend to have only a single adposition. Others have only two or three, which carry meanings, but extremely broad and generalized ones. There's a whole region of the Amazon where the languages tend to have only two adpositions, and they can basically be translated "with" and "without" - but the first includes meanings like "to", "from", "at", "inside", "near", "having to do with", and the other includes meanings like "for", "because", "outside of", "not including", "far from", and so forth. In these languages, IIRC, verbs of position and motion do the rest of the work. (I stole this setup for Jamna Kopiai.)

Same thing in Tok Pisin and Bislama IIRC - they have one or two prepositions with very broad meanings.

[Pole, the]

French has something similar.

[linguoboy]

French has something similar.

Um..what? Après, avant, avec, chez, contre, dans, de, depuis, derrière, devant, duran, en, entre, envers--need I go on?

[zelos]

I love the discussion here but I would still love seeing if the richest one is counting around 200, 500, or even in the thousands? are there languages that musters to the fifth magnitude in countable adpositions or?

[Bob Johnson]

I love the discussion here but I would still love seeing if the richest one is counting around 200, 500, or even in the thousands? are there languages that musters to the fifth magnitude in countable adpositions or?

every word in english is a preposition

[Rui]

It is also worth noting that adpositions do not always have "meanings" like ours do. Denoting a relationship is not the core function of an adposition! Extremely common, of course, but it is secondary to marking syntactic dependency. Some languages have adpositions that carry no relationship meaning at all, they exist purely as dependent-izing particles, and information about the specific relationship is indicated in other ways or left to the hearer to understand from context. Such languages would tend to have only a single adposition. Others have only two or three, which carry meanings, but extremely broad and generalized ones. There's a whole region of the Amazon where the languages tend to have only two adpositions, and they can basically be translated "with" and "without" - but the first includes meanings like "to", "from", "at", "inside", "near", "having to do with", and the other includes meanings like "for", "because", "outside of", "not including", "far from", and so forth. In these languages, IIRC, verbs of position and motion do the rest of the work. (I stole this setup for Jamna Kopiai.)

I know there are also languages such as Mandarin, where many/most(/all?) "prepositions" are actually verbs (this is one of the ways of deriving adpositions, right? Grammaticalized words from some other class), and each one can still be used as such. An example off the top of my head would be one of the words translating into English as "with (comitative)" 跟 gen1, which literally means "follow" (you can kind of tell by the "foot" radical), so "I'll go with you to the store" literally means "I will follow you to go to the store".

Even the word for "at/on/in" (general locative) is a verb that means "to be at/on/in" (locative...existential verb, or something like that). All locative phrases use that word, plus another noun to indicate where ("to be on X's side" = "next to", "to be on X's inside" = "in", etc.)

Other times, where English would use a prepositional phrase, Mandarin actually uses a verb phrase, since serial verbs are a thing in Mandarin. To say "I eat with chopsticks," I would literally say "I use chopsticks to eat," for example (not that that's ungrammatical in English, just not as common as the PP version- in Mandarin, there is no PP version, basically).

So yeah, you could argue that Mandarin doesn't even have adpositions, or you could argue that they do but they coexist with verbs of the same form, etc. etc.

[Astraios]

Lakota is similar. Most of its postpositions are just verbs or adverbial forms of verbs: uŋ (instrumental) < úŋ X uses smth, él (locative/dative) < étu X is the place, etc.

[Corundum]

Is there a good list to show basic adposition concepts? (if there is any such thing as "basic concepts")

You could look at how Latejami handles adpositions, or at the "basic concepts" of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, or perhaps the cases of Ithkuil could give you some good ideas. Don't just read it -- study it.

[ol bofosh]

Is there a good list to show basic adposition concepts? (if there is any such thing as "basic concepts")

You could look at how Latejami handles adpositions, or at the "basic concepts" of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage, or perhaps the cases of Ithkuil could give you some good ideas. Don't just read it -- study it.

Thanks Corundum, that's some very interesting stuff. My mouths watering with all the info.