Mr Peterson sir, where do adpositions come from..? In all seriousness though, I'm talking about the more basic ones: to, of, for, at &c. I'm toying with the idea of just cheaply using verbs like "to be at, to be inside of, to be from" but I would rather not go that route if possible.
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 thereâs 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 âcomeâ or âleaveâ or âexitâ. So, using literal translations, what wasâŚ
Arrow exit bow. (I.e. âThe arrow leaves/exits the bow.â)
âŚbecomesâŚ
Arrow from bow. (I.e. âThe arrow from the bow.â)
Ta da!
If youâre 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 âofâ and âoffâ in English? Thatâs no accidentâand 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 youâve heard some older people still say âwithâ as if it ended in a voiced fricative?], and the latter didnât voice, Iâm guessing, because it was less common, and I also imagine people stressing it [i.e. âNot OF: OFF.â].)
But yeah, notice with verbs of motion (because there can be all types: those with an implicit goal included, those without; those with an explicit start point included, those without; those that focus on the manner of the motion; those that focus on the effectâŚ), there are often implicit adpositional notions entailed. If you have a verb that means something like âcomeâ (many, many, many languages do), it implies that thereâs a place where one came from, and implies that thereâs a point of view that focuses on the arrival to some place. A person can walk from A to B and you can describing that motion as coming, going, leaving, arriving, etc. purely based on the point of view and how you want to describe it. Itâs no wonder these verbs are often used to form cases and adpositions. The key grammatical elements are there if you just strip away the semantic bits.
