Adpositional Inventories?

[Salmoneus]

I've put together what I think is quite a nice prepositional system for Rawàng Ata. However, there are around 20 prepositions in it. And Rawàng Ata is primarily inspired (albeit very loosely) by austronesian languages, which typically (though not always) have very few prepositions (colloquial Fijian, for instance, has a grand total of one preposition: i).

This isn't necessarily a problem - RA is 'inspired by' pacific languages, not a copy, and there are many odd things about it. But I've been wondering/worrying: is having a large adpositional inventory just a result of my European biases?

Unfortunately, WALS does not have an entry for number of adpositions (or how they break down - eg dedicated spatial vs non-spatial adpositions).

So does anyone else know what's common worldwide?

[Of course, I'm aware that precise numbers are difficult to pin down due to ambiguities - noun vs verb vs adposition vs idiomatic phrase vs etc.]

[Ziz]

I can only speak to what I know, but I'm familiar with some languages that are different enough from English to merit mentioning.

Hebrew has had a pretty limited number of core primitive prepositions, by which I mean prepositions that aren't derived from some other part of speech. There are other ones that look primitive but are still connected to lexical roots and so are probably related to them somehow (i.e. על ʕal "above" is likely related to ע.ל.ה ʕ-L-H meaning "rise"). Most other (complex) prepositions are combinations of one of these few primitives with a noun in the phonologically truncated construct state. I guess these are sort of pseudoprepositions in that you can't phonologically distinguish these compounds from preposition + noun phrases. For instance, leyad means "next to" but quite transparently is derived from the primitive le- plus the noun yad "hand."

Japanese parallels these pseudoprepositions with its own postpositions combined with nouns, like tsukue no shita ni which is like "in the desk's underneathness" for "under the desk."

My guess is that a lot of languages that don't have very many adpositions express the same things with these sorts of phrases, which may then reduce phonetically and extend metaphorically into other uses, so that in the end you have something you can point at and say, "this is an adposition." In that sense, having a lot of adpositions need not necessarily be an idiosyncrasy of western European languages, but just a stage of development in any language's inventory.

That said, 20 prepositions of opaque origin and internal structure does sound like a lot, just looking at two languages not related to English. It's also worth noting that many languages express things delegated in European-y languages to adpositions by some other means, like the "coverbs" of Chinese. So if your language makes its adposition class do a lot of work, that can be European-y.

[Fixsme]

Ryukyuan Languages have all at least 9 case markers (accusative, genitive, locatives or focus markers).
Do these count as adpositions?

[Hydroeccentricity]

There are two questions here, I think.

First, what information is carried by the noun phrase? Especially for movement we have variables like direction, speed, method of travel, etc., that can go on different phrases in the sentence. Adverbs might also shoulder some of the burden that in other languages might be placed on the noun phrase. So if your language is a satellite-framed language with few adverbs we would expect you to put a lot of information on the noun phrase, but a verb-framed language with lots of functional adverbs wouldn't.

Second, by what mechanism is the information carried on the noun phrase? I think this mostly boils down to three possibilities: syntax, nominal declension, and adpositions. So again, if you're lacking in one area, we might expect you to have more of the other.

As long as things balance out, I don't think your adpositional inventory is going to look unnatural. As for how European it is, I don't think you need to worry about inevitable coincidences as long as your grammar was worked out with care. Some things are bound to be similar to Euro langs, and they can't all be the result of subconscious biases.

I can add Korean to the list of languages where new pseudo-postpositions are created all the time. The number of opaque ones that are no longer recognizable as verbs or nouns is probably increasing all the time, while old ones routinely fall out of use. Whatever the "equilibrium" between those two forces might be, I doubt it's stable. Natural languages will provide too many differing examples for us to say definitively if 20 is "high" or not.

Out of curiosity, how do Austronesian languages get away with so few prepositions?

[----]

Out of curiosity, how do Austronesian languages get away with so few prepositions?

There's a class of 'local nouns', which refer to locations. This is the situation in other families as well: Yoruba only has 4, the other situations are accounted for by using different nouns, in this case body parts:

mo ń dúró ní orí (=lórí) ilé.
1S IMPF stand PREP head house
'I'm standing on top of the house'

[clawgrip]

If we go for unique particles that are not compounded and can attach to nouns, and don't worry about whether they interact with verbs as wel, then Japanese has:
10 "case particles" (Japanese native grammatical term...I wouldn't call them this)
4 "parallel markers" not included in the case particles
6 "adverbial particles" not included in the other lists
7 "binding particles"

And some other miscellaneous stuff

[Salmoneus]

Out of curiosity, how do Austronesian languages get away with so few prepositions?

There's a class of 'local nouns', which refer to locations. This is the situation in other families as well: Yoruba only has 4, the other situations are accounted for by using different nouns, in this case body parts:

mo ń dúró ní orí (=lórí) ilé.
1S IMPF stand PREP head house
'I'm standing on top of the house'

Indeed. Also worth noting that many austronesian languages make their local nouns inalienably possessed.


Hydro: I would like to worry about being more European than I realise. I would like to be able to decide for myself how European my language is. In some ways, I already has: Rawàng Ata will definitely have cases, and cases shown with suffixes at that. But I'd like to know what I'm doing before I do it. Or at least to be aware that I've done it!

Ziz: they're not all necessarily of opaque origin. In fact, some definitely are transparently derived. But at the moment they function as prepositions, rather than as verbs or nouns.

Thanks guys.

So so far we have:
- European, maybe Japanese: lots of adpositions
- Chinese: mostly verbs
- Austronesian, Japanese, Semitic, Korean (?), Niger-Kongo: mostly nouns

[clawgrip]

Japanese increases its inventory by using phrases like "at X's top" for "on" or "sticking to X" for "about"
It also uses verbs rather than adpositions/adverbs to mark types of movement, e.g. go around, go back, go through, go up, go down, go along, etc. etc. all have unique verbs.

[zompist]

For Chinese it'd be more accurate to say that there are about a dozen locative postpositions, plus a bunch of coverbs— which act as prepositions but derive from verbs and still exist with a related sense as verbs— e.g. cóng which is 'from' as a coverb, 'follow' as a verb.

The Old Chinese locative expression was N + PP, e.g. chéng lǐ 'in the city'. In Mandarin you can sometimes get away with that, but normally you add the coverb zài 'be located at' plus a suffix: zài chéng lǐtou.

In Quechua there are no adpositions. Most of the work is done by case endings— e.g. urqu-pi 'in the mountains'. I'm not sure how you'd say something like "The cat jumped onto the table" but I'm pretty sure it's misa-man hawa-n 'to-table upward', i.e. you use the directional case plus an adverb.

[linguoboy]

[- Austronesian, Japanese, Semitic, Korean (?), Niger-Kongo: mostly nouns

I would say you can remove the question mark from Korean. Basically, it uses a combination of case endings (chiefly two: locative 에 /ey/ and ablative 에서 /ey.se/) and nominal expressions (e.g. 차 밖에 /cha pakk.ey/ car outside-LOC "outside the car"), plus a number of (de)verbal constructions (e.g. 그없이 /ku eps.i/ "without him", lit. "DIST not.exist-ADV"). I'll have to check Martin and see whether he even proposes a class of true adpositions at all.

[Imralu]

Not sure how helpful this is, but Tok Pisin has only two prepositions, long and bilong. There are very frequent uses of long X bilong. One of my favourites is long as bilong (cognate to English "along arse belong")

• 1. Ol saveman tasol i save tru long as bilong ol samting.
  2. the.PL wise only PRED know true LOC cause GEN the.PL thing
  3. all saber-man that's-all he(?) saber true along arse belong all something
  4. Who is like the wise? Who knows the explanation of things?
  5. Only the wise truly know the cause of things.

1. Tok Pisin
2. gloss
3. cognates ... mostly just for laughs ... the predicate marker i may come from another language
4. biblical translation from NIV, first half of Ecclesiastes 8:1
5. more literal translation.

EDIT: Actually, on second thoughts, the wiktionary articles for long and bilong might really be of interest as they show how varied the uses of these prepositions are and you can get a sense for how they manage not to be too confusing.