Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
'Natural concepts' in the spatial topological domain — adpositional meanings in crosslinguistic perspective: an exercise in semantic typology (Levinson & Meira)
This week's paper was submitted by u/PyrolatrousCoagulate, and talks about how adpositional meanings ("on the table", "in the house", "under my bed", etc.) are expressed in various languages. The study is conducted based on a sample of nine languages from a diverse set of language regions all across the world. In this week's TyPoW you can get some inspiration from the paper, and then tell us how your conlang handles adpositional meanings! Now onto the prompts:
- How are adpositional meanings encoded? Prepositions, postpositions, relational nouns?
- How is the semantic space of adpositional meanings divided? Tell us e.g. which preposition encodes which topological relation!
- If your language has adpositions, are they used in any other way besides adpositional phrases?
- If you considered diachrony while creating your language, are there any interesting grammaticalization processes with respect to adpositions or relational nouns?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!