Claude Hagége's Adpositions (Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic PDF

This pioneering examine is predicated on an research of over two hundred languages, together with African, Amerindian, Australian, Austronesian, Indo-European and Eurasian (Altaic, Caucasian, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, Uralic), Papuan, and Sino-Tibetan. Adpositions are a virtually common a part of speech. English has prepositions; a few languages, resembling jap, have postpositions; others have either; and but others varieties that aren't rather both. As grammatical instruments they mark the connection among elements of a sentence: commonly one point governs a noun or noun-like notice or word whereas the opposite capabilities as a predicate. From the syntactic viewpoint, the supplement of an adposition is dependent upon a head: during this final sentence, for instance, a head is the supplement of on whereas on a head relies on depends and on is the marker of this dependency. Adpositions lie on the middle of the grammar of such a lot languages, their usefulness making them recurrent in daily speech and writing. Claude Hagege examines their morphological positive factors, syntactic features, and semantic and cognitive houses. He does so for the subsets either one of adpositions that categorical the family members of agent, sufferer, and beneficiary, and of these which mark area, time, accompaniment, or tool. Adpositions frequently govern case and are often progressively grammaticalized into case. the writer considers the entire set of functionality markers, together with case, that seem as adpositions and, in doing so, throws gentle on techniques of morphological and syntactic switch in numerous languages and language households. His publication may be welcomed via typologists and via syntacticians and morphologists of all theoretical stripes.