Tags · Structure
Adposition
Prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions marking the role of a noun phrase.
Topics with this tag
Where does “the man’s head” carry its mark?
Two nouns get tied together in five ways: a genitive on the possessor (Latin, Russian, English ’s), a person affix on the possessed noun (Hungarian, Ainu, Navajo), both at once (Turkish, Quechua), a free particle between the two (Japanese の, Mandarin 的, Romance de), or nothing beyond word order (Welsh, Indonesian).
Do adpositions come before or after the noun phrase?
Adposition order tracks verb–object order as a strong tendency — after the noun in OV languages (Japanese tēburu no ue ni), before it in VO (English on the table). Exceptions recur across families: Persian and Tajik combine OV order with prepositions, while SVO-leaning Finnish keeps its Uralic postpositions.
How does a language say that two things match in degree?
English needs two little words for it: as tall as her mother. The commonest arrangement worldwide uses just one — French grande comme sa mère, Turkish annesi kadar uzun — and a smaller group puts the two people together and calls them equally tall. A few make a verb do the work, so that she reaches her mother in height. Across a 119-language survey, one arrangement is virtually unattested wherever the standard stands as a phrase of its own: a degree word with the standard left bare.