Creyeditor wrote: ↑11 Jul 2020 19:21
Okay, so something that springs to mind is that pronouns and adpositions also have a very low lexical or semantic content in some languages.
Yes they do, in my opinion; in English, for example.
In my (possibly limited) experience it seems to be (unless I’ve been mistaken) mostly generativists who think adpositions are content-heavy in some languages. I don’t know which languages
How content-heavy a pronoun is depends on which semantic facts about its antecedent it must agree with.
For instance in Texperanto it may have to agree with two or more of the co-referent noun’s first consonant and/or first vowel and/or last consonant and/or last vowel.
In a Bantu language with thirty or forty gender-and-number noun-classes it might have to agree in class and case.
In such languages there may be a great deal of semantic content in a pronoun,
particularly if there are five grammatical numbers* and forty genders, and most of the genders are mostly semantically-based.
*singular, dual, paucal, lesser plural, greater plural
*singular, dual, lesser paucal, greater paucal, plural
*singular, dual, trial, paucal, plural
The more cases, especially the more “semantic” (as opposed to “syntactic”) cases, the language has, the more syntactic information case conveys; including the cases of pronouns.
In fact, if the language has case-stacking, and cases had to be stacked on the pronoun, it might be quite “heavy” semantically!
......
As for semantical or lexical content of adpositions;
The more adpositions a language has, the more information the speaker’s choice of adposition conveys.
For instance, if there are sixteen of them, choosing one conveys four bits of information, twice as much as if there were only four to choose from; if there are sixty-four of them, choosing one conveys six bits of information, three times as much as if there were only four.
How much of that information is lexical/semantic content? I guess I don’t know.
English has about fifty adpositions, doesn’t it?
It’s surely in the top ten, probably in the top five, and maybe in the top two or three languages by number of adpositions.
But if I am not mistaken (and maybe I am), that’s less than a quarter the number of adpositions the Natlang with the most adpositions has.
If adpositional phrases are head-marked, the adposition may tell a great deal of semantic information about its object noun-phrase by agreeing with its number and gender, especially if there are a lot of numbers and a lot of genders and most genders are mostly semantically assigned.
In fact, a bivalent adposition may have to agree with both of its object noun-phrases in different, independent ways, thus communicating semantic details about both of them.
And if adpositions are double-marked, an adpositional phrase modifying a noun may say something about the meaning of the noun it modifies; or an adpositional phrase modifying a verb may say something about the meaning of the verb it modifies.
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IIANM English is one of the natlangs some generativists say adpositions carry a significant load of semantic lexical content in.
If so I’m not sure I agree. But maybe.