Prepositions > Postpositions and Case prefixes

[Davush]

I was wondering how languages go from having prepositions to postpositions? Does a dramatic shift just suddenly occur whereby prepositions become increasingly placed after the noun, or are there intermediate stages which facilitate this?

I have a conlang which has prepositions, but is verb-final. I would like it to shift to postpositions and eventually derive a case system. I know case prefixes are meant to be very rare and the prepositions would have to shift to allow me to derive the case system. Incidentally, it would be interesting to hear if anybody knows any examples of languages with a prefixing case system and why case prefixes are so rare?

Thanks!

[Ebon]

Wals has a chapter on case affix position.

You could still go with a prefix case system if you wanted. It's not common compared to suffixing systems, but I personally don't think that's an issue.

(Can't answer the main question, sorry.)

[Salmoneus]

I don't have a definitive answer. But I'd bear in mind that the postpositions and the prepositions don't have to be the same adpositions.

In IE, a lot of things that ended up as prepositions seem to have originally be adverbs. Broadly speaking, as I understand it, what seems to have happened is a bulk movement (considering intransitives with oblique arguments, or applicatives where the object is marked as oblique with postpositions):

Subject [Oblique Postposition] [Verb Adverb]
Subject Oblique [Postposition Verb Adverb] (reinterpretation)
Subject [Postposition Verb Adverb] Oblique (movement)
Subject [Prefix Verb] [Preposition Oblique] (reanalysis)

So what was the adverb ends up a preposition before the oblique. And the old postpositions? Stuck to the front of the verb as an applicative prefix, as is so common across IE. Often, of course, the original adverbs and postpositions were close in meaning and derived from one another, so the end result was that you could choose to use a prefix or a (new) preposition.

Of course, it's all much more complicated than that, but that's my impression of the core change.


On a small scale, you see the same sort of thing with circumfixes. French, for instance, began with the negative preceding particle, "ne X", moved to a circumplaced pair of particles "ne X pas", where 'pas' was just an emphatic, and colloquially now just has a following particle, "X pas". So again, it's moved from before the noun to after it, but the particle itself hasn't moved. It's been replaced by a new particle in the new location.


Of course, I'm not saying that adpositions (etc) can't sometimes move around. English, for instance, can move a lot of things around very freely ("input the data", "put in the data", "put the data in"), though arguably that's partly just a lack of marking. [I interpret that as refersing the IE shit. 'input' vs 'put in' is the old prefix vs preposition choice, originating in postposition vs adverb. But "put in the data" uses a preposition whereas "put the data in" uses effectively an adverb, placed at the end of the clause as adverbs often are - it just happens that the adverb has the same form as the preposition.]

[Davush]

Thanks - that gives me some ideas to work with. I didn't know that that a lot of IE postpositions are from earlier adverbs. I don't need an ultra-detailed realistic account of how each and every case is formed, but I do like to know how things get to where they are.

I was wondering if anybody knows any examples of languages which have shifted from pre- to postpositions (rather than replacing them with adverbs or such)? Or similarly, how common are word order shifts and what motivates them, i.e., SVO > SOV?

[Isfendil]

I would also desperately like an answer to this question. I'm trying to bring cases back to a far future english daughter and currently am turning common verbs into case endings. I was wondering if that was a possible avenue or if I should scrap the idea?

[k1234567890y]

I personally guess there are intermediate stages of adposition shifting if there are no case endings otherwise, but maybe it just happens suddenly. Some adpositions can either be prepositions or postpositions in some languages. For example(taken from Wikipedia):

English: He slept through the whole night OR the whole night through.
(Standard) German: meiner Meinung nach OR nach meiner Meinung ("in my opinion")
(Standard) German: die Straße entlang OR entlang der Straße ("along the road"; here a different case is used when entlang precedes the noun)

I personally guess that circumpositions might also serve as some intermediate forms in some cases

Also, as far as I know, at least some Austronesian languages in Melanesia and New Guinea have shifted from the VO+prepositional order to OV+postpositional order due to language contact, they are influenced by New Guinea languages, but you can simply do the syntactic change without indicating what happened.

However, I guess word order change might sometimes happen spontaneously, for example, I guess Germanic languages shifted from OV to VO through the use of V2 order order before or during Proto-Germanic period(however, I need to know the information about the grammar of Gothic...).

@Isfendil: I guess it could happen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bǎ_construction < you can do something similar on future English, with the use of serial verbal construction and grammaticalization of verbs(I personally guess that the "Bǎ_construction" of Chinese is a form of differential object marking).