41–46 of 46 posts
"It is noteworthy to point out that in Spanish or English, there are no expressions of time that go any further than two days into the past or the future;" I'll think about this more next week.
And yet, we still struggle through life.
"It is noteworthy to point out that in Spanish or English, there are no expressions of time that go any further than two days into the past or the future;" I'll think about this more next week.
"It is noteworthy to point out that in Spanish or English, there are no expressions of time that go any further than two days into the past or the future;" I'll think about this more next week.
English also doesn't have dedicated words for various familiar relationships, unlike some other languages. Older / younger brother, father's eldest brother, neighbors cousins friends neighbors dog, that sort of thing. And yet, we still struggle through life.
In particular, the example which led me to learn about this system was someone traversing something like "neighbour's cousin's friend's neighbour's adopted corella" and addressing him (once translated into english) as "uncle".
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There are good reasons to think of it as being a word. For example, much like the particle 's , it applies to a phrase without being at all concerned with what word it modifies. (Think "a week and a half ago "; which word would you argue "ago" is being suffixed to?) Does this make it different in any meaningful way from an agglutinative morpheme? No, obviously not. Whether to call a language "agglutinative" is alread…
It applies to week-and-a-half, which is a phrase only because there's not a word like fortnight means "two weeks"...
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> It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. (Is there another thing like that in English? I can't think of one, though there's one in German: entlang) There are some similar constructions: - Three days hence. (archaic) - Three days later. - Three days beforehand. - Three days afterwards. I failed to think of one that didn't have to do with time. You could think…
I like your antipenultimate example
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> It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. Called a ‘postposition’. And that’s precisely what ‘ago’ is!
The nonjudgmental term of art appears to be "adposition". It isn't clear to me why this was coined as "adposition" and not "apposition". "Preposition" is already something of an unnatural word class. They have two main functions in English: to describe some kind of location ("Sam? He's with Natasha"), and to mark certain arguments to verbs ("The tools? Sam's playing with them"). It's just a coincidence that prepositi…
Not really… these categories fall together in a lot of languages. It doesn’t even require prepositions: a lot of languages have case markers which can be used for both location and verbal arguments.
The specific examples you’ve given are, respectively, called the ‘comitative’ and ‘instrumental’ uses of with. These two categories are particularly prone to falling together, mostly because the boundaries between them aren’t particularly clear: for instance, if you say, I made the coffee with milk, you could say that the coffee is accompanied by the milk (comitative), but you could also say that you’re using the milk (instrumental).