Goal: Create sources for new adpositions
Note: These sources are often nouns or verbs.
Tip: The source you choose affects position.
Work focus: Create/Make/List
Today’s goal is to create lexical sources for adpositions. Once you create the lexical sources, you can reduce the forms to create the grammaticalized adpositions, such as having meho “belly” reduce to mo “in, inside.” I mentioned yesterday that the sources you choose for your adpositions—be they nouns or verbs—can affect whether they will be prepositions or postpositions.
For instance, if you have SOV word order and select verbs as the sources for your adpositions, then they will most likely be postpositions (i.e. they will pattern the same way verbs do in your language and occur at the end of their phrases).
When nouns are the sources of adpositions, you can think of them as head nouns that are then modified by another noun. Going back to the example I provided of meho “belly” becoming mo “in, inside,” then the logic is that the phrase would originally have been something like “belly [of] lake” (e.g. “I swim [the] belly [of] lake”) to mean “in the lake.” Going with this route, you need to decide if it makes more sense for the head noun to occur before any modifiers or vice versa.
You may end up using nouns for some adposition sources and verbs for others. Depending on word orders in your language, there is a possibility that your adpositions will then be split into two groups, where some are prepositions and others are postpositions.