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Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Tue Nov 17, 2015 2:41 pm
by gufferdk
Hi everybody.
I feel like it would be nice to have a thread like this where we can collect what we collectively know about different ways of conveyign the information that English, as well as a lot of other european languages coveys through the usage of prepositions. That way it can be used as a source of inspiration while conlanging, especially for those without access to an academic library, kinda like
the correspondence library thread in L&L Museum.
Please post whatever interesting non-English-style system you know of.
To make my contribution to this thread, here is the system that the St. Lawrence Island dialect of Siberian Yupik uses:
The St. Lawrence Island dialect of Siberian Yupik uses a mixture of prepositional cases, demonstrative pronouns and adverbs and positonal stems.
Cases
The SLIdoSY has several cases of which four can be used to convey information that English would convey via prepositions:
Localis, which is used for the place the action or state described by the verb occurs and objects of camparison in certain cases.
Terminalis, which is used for the destination of a directed action and some mumbo-jumbo with embedded verbs that I don't fully understand.
Vialis, which is used for the route of physical or temporal motion, the mean by which something is done, and a part of a whole towards which action is directed.
The ablative-modalis case which is used for a whole lot of things:
1. The indefinite object of an intransitive verb
2. The point of physical or temporal origin
3. Further information about nouns expanded with verbalising suffixes
4. The subject matter of speaking, thinking, etc.
5. Indirect objects of ditransitive verbs
6. Objects of camparison
7. The instrument used to perform an action
Obviously, not all the functions of the different cases replace prepositions, but some of them do. Examples:
Neghtuq angyamini. "(S)he/it ate in his/her/its own boat". Angyamini being composed of the stem angyagh ("boat") and the localis, singular number, 3. person reflective posessor noun ending "-mini"
Kiiwegnekun esnightunga. "I walked along the river." Kiiwe-gnekun is composed of the stem meaning river and -gnekun which is the vialis, dual nuber, unposessed noun ending. (Rivers, for some reason, are dual, even if there is only one river)
Demonstrative pronouns and adverbs
Unlike English where this and that are the only demonstrative pronouns and here and there are the only demonstrative adverbs the SLIdoSY has a large number of such words. These are made from special demonstrative stems expanded with a variety of suffixes. A few examples could be the stem "kiwe" which meas "towards southeast" (if you are in the town of Gambell it also means "towards Savoonga" (the other town on the island)), and the stem "qage" meaning outside.
These stems are then inflected with different endings to elaborate the meaning.
If one wishes to indicate the nuber of objects and which case the objects are in one can in most cases use by using the ending "u" in singular and "ku" in dual and plural followed the unposessed nound endings. Examples:
Kiwe + u + mi (singular localis) = kiwumi "In the one towards southeast (or towards Savoonga)"
Qage + ku + gneng (dual ablative-modalis) = qaagugneng "From the two outside"
Demonstrative adverbs uses the suffix "-a", as well as a seperate set of case endings. Example:
Age (over there) + a + gun (vialis) = agagun "Through the area over there.
The difference between demonstrative adverbs and demonstrative pronouns are that adverbs refer to areas, while pronouns refers to entities. Compare:
Adverb: Esghagaqa qawaak pikani. "I saw a bird up there"
Pronoun: Esghaghaqa qawaak pikumi. "I saw a bird in/on the thing up there.
Positional stems
The SLIdoSY has a number of stems that refers to relative positions. Examples of such stems are asi "area beneath" and sivu "area in front". These can the be conjugated using the usual noun endings. These stems are used as posessions to indicate relative locations. Example:
Sivu + mni (localis, singular, 1st person singular posessor) = sivumni "in front of me" (lit. my area in front)
Additonally the suffix "-ate" can be added to a demonstrative to form a positional stem. This shifts the frame of reference from the speaker to the grammatical posessor.
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2015 1:59 pm
by vec
Verbs.
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2015 4:45 pm
by Abi
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2015 5:21 pm
by Pole, the
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2015 9:46 pm
by Mâq Lar
Applicatives on verbs are one solution: instead of labelling the noun with a preposition to indicate its role, you mark the verb for the role:
I walk to the park
I in-walk the park
I walk through the park
I through-walk the park
etc
If you had a way to mark gender of referent on the applicatives I suppose you could have quite a complex verb phrase - in "I walk through the park to the school," if park and school are different genders (eg one masc one fem), you could have "I to.fem-through.masc-walk the school the park". A similar effect to genders could be accomplished by having some kind of bound morpheme coreferencing the full noun phrase - eg "I to.sku-through.pa-walk the school the park" where sku and pa are phonetically reduced from school and park (I might steal this idea for a polysynthetic conlang I've been toying with. Hmmmm)
Another possibility I suppose would be to have lexically different verbs for walk-from walk-through etc - "I left the station, crossed the park and approached the school"
Adverbial modification would work too.
Some of these strategies get clumsy/impossible when there are several "prepositional phrases" to express - whereas PPs can just be strung together quite simply. However, in natural speech, long strings of PPs are not that common "he was killed by Professor Plum in the library with the lead pipe on a Tuesday with Mrs Peacock" is not that natural a thing to say - in dialogue the nouns are usually spread out.
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 3:18 am
by So Haleza Grise
Adpositions are rare in Australian languages. Only a handful have them at all. There is however often a quite sophisticated system of spatial deixis. Prototypically, spatial relationships on nouns are marked The locative case morpheme is often formally identical to the ergative and/or instrumental case marker. Most languages have allative and ablative cases, plus a perlative case (or case-like suffix) for motion "through" or "across".
Other than that there are often specialised locational nouns, so for example [mountaintop]+LOC means "on top of the mountain".
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2015 8:15 am
by masako
vec wrote:Verbs.
+1
Locative verbs, relative verbs, etc.
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 11:05 am
by Dama Diwan
Dama prefers postpositions (all ending with -a) you must see examples starting from
https://www.facebook.com/groups/omado.sosti.matiko/ thanks.
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 2:09 pm
by vec
masako wrote:vec wrote:Verbs.
+1
Locative verbs, relative verbs, etc.
Also just regular verbs, but subordinated, either syntactically or morphologically.
Consider the following made up examples:
I was fired blame John
"I was fired because of John"
(subordinated syntactically)
I was fired blaming John
"I was fired because of John"
(subordinated morphologically)
I walk leave city
"I walked out of the city"
(syntactic)
I walk leaving city
"I walked out of the city
(morphological)
There's a few examples of this sort of thing in real English. Considering, given, assuming are good examples. So imagine that but as the primary system rather than secondary.
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 3:42 pm
by linguoboy
vec wrote:I walk leave city
"I walked out of the city"
(syntactic)
I'm not seeing the subordination here. This looks to me like a typical
serial verb construction.
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 5:15 pm
by Travis B.
In Xanínə I am using a combination of applicatives and relational nouns. Where other languages would have attributive adpositions, I use a combination of a relative clause, an existential noun with an applicative, and in many cases a relational noun to express the same concept. (Note that there is only one applicative, so relational nouns are used to express different concepts such as dative, instrumental, ablative, locative, and allative, and they in turn are often combined with other relational nouns expressing different positions in genitive constructions.)
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2016 8:36 pm
by Hydroeccentricity
linguoboy wrote:vec wrote:I walk leave city
"I walked out of the city"
(syntactic)
I'm not seeing the subordination here. This looks to me like a typical
serial verb construction.
Well, if you used an SOV word order it would be more obviously an adposition and not a serial verb:
city leave I walk
or possibly
city(object marker) leave I(subject marker) walk
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Fri Jan 15, 2016 2:21 pm
by vec
Yeah, sorry, not the best example maybe. The subordination would be apparent in other sentences. But that yes, is a type of a serial verb construction either way.
Re: Alternatives to prepositions
Posted: Thu Jan 21, 2016 8:03 am
by Hallow XIII
There are all of the ways and attempting to reduce this to some set of equivalences between surface structures is a good way to not get anywhere.
I.e., it is not a good idea to think of this in terms of "alternatives to prepositions", because the class of meanings English expresses with prepositions is by no means homogenous. If you end up "picking an alternative", and subsequently translating every English preposition with the same construction, then you've already imported a significant English bias into your language. Much the same applies for taking an English preposition, going "well the equivalent of that is this", and missing shades of meaning that are conflated in English but kept separate in other languages. A classic example, of course, is the conflation of comitative and instrumental semantics in "with", but even then that is only with + noun. What about construction of the form "with S V-ing", where "with" modifies a verbal phrase?
Needless to say, of course, that this thing goes the other way around as well. Some languages use a single converbal form to express a whole bunch of adverbials in English, like Turkic -p.
So tl;dr be very careful about what you mean when you say "the meanings expressed by English prepositions", because it's pretty easy to end up just mapping between surface structures.
