Talk:Inflected preposition

Why 'preposition'?

What makes a contraction of a preposition with a personal pronoun an "inflected preposition" and not a case of a personal pronoun? --JorisvS (talk) 18:28, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

"Inflected preposition" is a traditional name. More accurately, it's a contraction of a preposition and a personal pronoun. Calling it a case of a personal pronoun is problematic as it would imply that pronouns in languages like Welsh and Irish have an enormous number of cases that nouns don't have, and that all of those cases are marked by sounds that by coincidence strongly resemble the prepositions used before nouns. Really they're not any different from the preposition + article contractions found in German like im "in the" and zum "to the" - no one calls those cases of the definite article! Angr (talk) 22:05, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Well, indeed no one calls them that and they have arisen through contraction, but they do fit the definition: "The case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence.". --JorisvS (talk) 08:21, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

They only fit the defintion if you consider them inflectional forms of the pronouns (which threatens to become a circular definition: they're only case forms if they're inflectional forms, and they're only inflectional forms if they're case forms), but I don't. It would be like calling "I'll", "you'll", and "he'll" inflectional forms of "will" that are marked for 1st person singular, 2nd person, and 3rd person singular masculine by means of prefixes. To be fair, though, you're not the first person to think of this. There is a doctoral dissertation (I forget the name of the author at the moment) in which the argument is made that the inflected prepositions of Scottish Gaelic are case forms. But I don't buy it, and I don't think most linguists would. Angr (talk) 09:37, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Say one replaces one or more of these with forms that cannot (easily) be analyzed as a fused preposition+pronoun. Semantically nothing changes, only their form, but how else would you now treat it but as a case of a pronoun? --JorisvS (talk) 09:53, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

I've thought about that and don't have a completely convincing answer. Possibly an adverb -- Irish ann means both "in it" and "there", two terms that have plenty of semantic overlap, and adverbs do have a tendency to be "pro-prepositions" (i.e. single words that stand in for prepositional phrases the way pronouns are single words that stand in for noun phrases and pro-verbs are single words that stand in for verb phrases). But I don't know if phonological transparency is a necessary quality of contractions: Irish sa means "in the" and is hardly easily analyzable as a contraction of i + an. So even forms that cannot be easily analyzed as a fused preposition + pronoun may remain contractions nevertheless. Angr (talk) 10:00, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

In which case many case markers would remain fused adpositions from a prehistorical time, whether we identify them as such or not. --JorisvS (talk) 10:08, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

For what it is worth, I have always found conjugated preposition to be a more natural term than inflected preposition. Inflection can be anything; conjugation is for person. Or so it seems to me. -- Evertype·✆ 09:28, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

That is incorrect. Conjugation refers to the inflection of a verb, whether for person or not (see the page for grammatical conjugation). As such, there are languages like Swedish and Japanese which conjugate verbs for tense, but do not conjugate them for person or number. Therefore, the term inflected preposition really is more accurate, especially compared to terms like conjugation and declension, which are subtypes of inflection specific to certain parts of speech. Latinamnonvoco (talk) 01:29, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

But an inflected preposition need not be one that takes forms with the personal pronoun, it can also be one that takes forms for other things, such as the gender of a following noun. We have that in colloquial German where contractions between preposition and article form have been developed into a system by which prepositions take certain endings depending on whether they're construed with dative or accusative, and depending on the gender of the following noun. It's rather a regular system. By that the preposition "auf" has the following inflected forms: aufe, aufem, aufen, aufer, aufs. And the preposition "in" has the forms: inne, im [here contracted], innen, inner, ins. And son on. (And note: The difference to standard German contractions, which are just a few, is that the colloquial version is really a system of inflections that can be added to almost any preposition.) — Thus... inflected preposition is not a wrong term, but the definition "preposition with a personal pronoun form" is wrong. It's more than that.

And even though the example of colloquial German is a very good one: let's make an even more explicit one by constructing a language. Say it has two genders and two numbers. And prepositions in this language take endings depending on what kind of noun they're followed by: -a (masc. sg.), -ara (masc. pl.), -i (fem. sg.), -in (f. pl.). Now the preposition "bal" (you choose its meaning) is inflected bala, balara, bali, balin. — Would that not be an inflected preposition? Course it would. Hence the definition currently given in the first section of this article is plain wrong. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.206.149.16 (talk) 17:01, 4 March 2015 (UTC)