Adpositions

An adposition is a grammatical word that forms a phrase with a term it governs and, like a case affix, relates that term to another unit, mostly a verb, noun or adjective, by marking the grammatical and semantic link between them (Hagège's definition, p. 8). Case markers and adpositions cannot be told apart consistently across languages (Haspelmath p. 97), so an entry records the relations it marks as the comparative case values that case markers mark, a set because adpositions are polysemous, beside its exponent as morphs, the positions it takes relative to its term, and the complements it takes. An adposition may occur without its term: in is transitive in She stayed in the house and intransitive in She stayed in (Huddleston and Pullum p. 635), the entity the term would refer to being given by the context (Hagège p. 54).

Main definitions

• Adposition: the entry.
• Adposition.Linearization, Adposition.Complement: positions and complement kinds.
• Adposition.IsPreposition, IsPostposition, IsCircumposition, IsAmbiposition: the position classes.
• Adposition.Takes, IsIntransitive, IsTransitive, IsParticle: valence.
• Adposition.IsSimple, form, toWord: the exponent.
• Adposition.IsSpatial: an adposition marking a spatial value.

Main results

• Adposition.isParticle_iff: a particle takes no complement.
• Adposition.isSpatial_iff: a spatial adposition marks a value with a direction.

Implementation notes

• The positions are Dryer's prepositions, postpositions and inpositions (WALS chapter 85) and the circumpositions, whose two parts stand at the beginning and the end of the phrase (Hagège p. 115). They are a set, since an ambiposition is one adposition that can be preposed or postposed to its term (Hagège p. 114), as Dutch op is; two adpositions that share a form, each restricted to its own position, are homonyms rather than one ambiposition (p. 115), and two entries. A circumposition lists its pieces in surface order, the first before the term.
• The transitive and intransitive uses of one preposition are one entry, as in Huddleston and Pullum (p. 635). A particle, which governs no term and so falls outside Hagège's definition, is an entry as well, so that a circumposition such as Dutch over … heen is made of entries.
• Haspelmath's flag, his term for case markers and adpositions together, is a bound form, and an adposition that can occur in isolation is not one (pp. 96, 99); the entries are adpositions bound or free, the attachment of each piece recorded in its morph.
• IsSimple is Hagège's simple adposition; his complex adposition is an adposition with a case affix (§2.2.3), which he keeps apart from a compound one (p. 129).
• functions is ∅ where no comparative value fits, as for despite.
• The case an adposition governs on its complement (Corbett) is a fact about a language's own case values and is left to the fragments.

References

• Hagège 2010, Adpositions
• Haspelmath 2019, Indexing and flagging, and head and dependent marking
• Huddleston & Pullum 2002, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language
• Blake 2001, Case
• Corbett 2026, The typology of government by adpositions: Towards an understanding of “differential”
• Dryer 2013, Chapters in The World Atlas of Language Structures Online