#adpositions

Today I learned what subordinators and coodinators are from running into the word "futa" in lì'fya leNa'vi (Na'vi language), which helped me understand in English what words like "because, so that, etc" do and what clauses are more. Even though English is my mother-tongue, understanding how it functions in my own language is helpful to understanding how it's used in other languages, too, and other linguistics concepts related to its function, like the topical case ending in lì'fya leNa'vi (and "topic/comment" oriented languages like lì'fya leNa'vi), and also adpositions that connect clauses like "ulte" and "a".

Yesterday I learned that Español and Na'vi have a similar construction for saying you like something, using an intransitive verb for "to be pleasing" (Esp: "gusta"; N: "sunu").

Because intransitive words do not have "permission" to take on direct objects, "gusta" and "sunu" must turn the subject into its an indirect object form to express that something is pleasing to the subject. Español does this using indirect object pronouns and lì'fya leNa'vi does this using indirect object case endings (because of its "limited free word order").

Esp: Me gusta el sombrero

N: Oeru sunu hawre'

lit. "to me is pleasing the hat" which expresses "to me, the hat is pleasing" or "the hat is pleasing to me".

Adpositions 

Some languages, like English, have prepositions, others have postpositions, according to whether the “function word” comes before of after the noun, verb or phrase it applies to. Some languages have both types and some have no adpositions at all, relying on case marking. Other types as inpositions or circumpositions are very rare, and usually they are found in a language that also mainly has pre/postpositions. 

Adpositions come either from verbs or nouns, and their positioning and case marking depend crucially on which source they come from. For example, an adposition that comes from a verb will come from a transitive verb, and the object of the preposition will be the object of the verb. The object of the new preposition, then, will get the same case marking as it would have gotten from the verb, and be positioned where it would have been. If there’s no case marking in your language, then it gets no case marking; if there is, then it gets whatever case the verb was assigning it until analogy levels it and does something else with it. But yeah, when it comes to ordering, this is what happens:

VO > PN

OV > NP

Bingo-bango. So, for example, an ablative adposition often comes from a verb like “come” or “leave” or “exit”. So, using literal translations, what was…

Arrow exit bow. (I.e. “The arrow leaves/exits the bow.”)

…becomes…

Arrow from bow. (I.e. “The arrow from the bow.”)

Ta da!

If you’re looking for a laundry list of sources for common adpositions, you can look at my book, or The World Lexicon of Grammaticalization, where a lot of that info (i.e. sources for grammatical elements) came from. Some of these are basic, but some of them are not. For example, genitive adpositions usually come from something else. Ever notice the similarity between “of” and “off” in English? That’s no accident—and the former came from the latter. (And the former is voiced probably because it was used a lot, and function words tended to voice word-final fricatives in older English [perhaps you’ve heard some older people still say “with” as if it ended in a voiced fricative?], and the latter didn’t voice, I’m guessing, because it was less common, and I also imagine people stressing it [i.e. “Not OF: OFF.”].)

This is how you need to go through this:

How are verbs and their objects ordered?

How are nouns and their possessors ordered?

Do your adpositions derive ultimately from nouns or verbs?

For instance:

Items can be "on sale" but not "in sale" or "under sale" or "through". It makes sense to convey the phenomena of price of an item being discounted as occuring "on" a space. The adposition "on" helps convey an idea that something is being applied to prices which has a surface or contains surfaces; in this concept, "on sale", theres some sort of indication that reductions are placed "on" the abstract or physical part of something that can be priced (think special tags on items, the act of registering barcodes for discounts, a code placed onto a price, etc).

Its possible to be "under the weather" to convey feeling sad or sick, but not "through the weather" or "into the weather". The adposition "under" helps to convey a specific spatial sense of the stormy imagery in a deictic way. Because, although people can experience weather in the sky or below the ground (in a olane or in a cave, etc), usually the way people experience weather conditions, particularly unpleasant or severe ones as implied in the idiom, is under the stratosphere.

Its possible for a fugitive to be "at large" or an unfortunate someone to be "at a loss" or for an amount to be "at least", but not "by large" or "between loss" or "above least" bc the conept of being criminally wanted, for someone to be speechless or to have lost something, or for the quantity or quality of something implies spatial understanding of these phenomena to be positions on a gradient or line of occurances. A destination that implies deictic positioning from a seperate aforementioned (or implied) action; someone is "at large" from being once contained or liberated; someone is arrived at loss to from having; something is somewhere away from the minimum.

Adpositions have had a grip on me lately bc of how cool they are as words that have almost entirely directional and spacial function in instantly connecting information in speech to eachother in a way that conveys atmosphere and, sometimes vividly, movement. I see the preposition "to" and literally imagine the clause, constituent, or word before it "taking" or "grabbing" its conceptual information to connect it to the other side; the word toward is like a boat tugging a word or phrase to the adjacent information.