Postposition in the context of Grammatical modifier


Postposition in the context of Grammatical modifier

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⭐ Core Definition: Postposition

Adpositions are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (in, under, towards, behind, ago, etc.) or mark various semantic roles (of, for). The most common adpositions are prepositions (which precede their complement) and postpositions (which follow their complement).

An adposition typically combines with a noun phrase, this being called its complement, or sometimes object. English generally has prepositions rather than postpositions – words such as in, under and of precede their objects, such as "in England", "under the table", "of Jane" – although there are a few exceptions including ago and notwithstanding, as in "three days ago" and "financial limitations notwithstanding". Some languages that use a different word order have postpositions instead (like Turkic languages) or have both types (like Finnish). The phrase formed by an adposition together with its complement is called an adpositional phrase (or prepositional phrase, postpositional phrase, etc.). Such a phrase can function as a grammatical modifier or complement in a wide range of types of phrases.

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Postposition in the context of Analytic language

An analytic language is a type of natural language that uses affixes very rarely but in which a series of root/stem words is accompanied by prepositions, postpositions, particles, and modifiers. This is opposed to synthetic languages, which synthesize many concepts into a single word, using affixes regularly.

Syntactic roles are assigned to words primarily by word order. For example, by changing the individual words in the Latin phrase "fēl-is pisc-em cēpit" ("the cat caught the fish") to "fēl-em pisc-is cēpit" ("the fish caught the cat"), the fish becomes the subject, while the cat becomes the object. This transformation is not possible in an analytic language without altering the word order. Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes.

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Postposition in the context of Mewari language

Mewari is an Indo-Aryan language of the Rajasthani languages group. It is spoken by about five million speakers in Rajsamand, Bhilwara, Udaipur, Chittorgarh and Pratapgarh districts of Rajasthan state and Mandsaur, Neemuch districts of Madhya Pradesh state of India.

There are 31 consonants, 10 vowels and 2 diphthongs in Mewari. Intonation is prominent. Dental fricative is replaced by glottal stop at initial and medial positions. Inflection and derivation are the forms of word formation. There are two numbers—singular and plural, two genders—masculine and feminine, and three cases—simple, oblique, and vocative. Case marking is partly inflectional and partly postpositional. Concord is of nominative type in the imperfective aspect but ergative in the perfective aspect. Nouns are declined according to their endings. Pronouns are inflected for number, person, and gender. Third person is distinguished not only in gender but also in remote-proximal level. There are three tenses—present, past, and future; and four moods. Adjective are of two types—marked or unmarked. Three participles are there—present, past, and perfect. It has SOV word order.

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Postposition in the context of Object–verb word order

In linguistics, an OV language (object–verb language), or a language with object-verb word order, is a language in which the object comes before the verb. OV languages compose approximately forty-seven percent of documented languages.

They are primarily left-branching, or head-final, with heads often found at the end of their phrases, with a resulting tendency to have the adjectives before nouns, to place adpositions after the noun phrases they govern (in other words, to use postpositions), to put relative clauses before their referents, and to place auxiliary verbs after the action verb. Of the OV languages that make use of affixes, many predominantly, or even exclusively, as in the case of Turkish, prefer suffixation to prefixation.

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