The Emergence of Axial Parts
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Many languages have specialized locative words or morphemes translating roughly into words like ‘front,’ ‘back,’ ‘top,’ ‘bottom,’ ‘side,’ and so on. Often, these words are used instead of more specialized adpositions to express spatial meanings corresponding to ‘behind,’ ‘above,’ and so on. I argue, on the basis of a cross-linguistic survey of such expressions, that in many cases they motivate a syntactic category which is distinct from both N and P, which I call AxPart for ‘Axial Part’; I show how the category relates to the words which instantiate it, and how the meaning of the construction is derived from the combination of P[lace] elements, AxParts, and the lexical material which expresses them.
Source: Nordlyd
DOI: 10.7557/12.85
Author: Peter Svenonius
Institution: UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1715198228