ADP: adposition
Definition
Armenian has prepositions and postpositions but no circumpositions. They occur before or after complement noun phrase (noun, pronoun) and they form a single structure with the complement to express its grammatical and semantic relation to another unit within a clause.
Some prepositions take the form of fixed multiword expressions, e.g. ի սեր “for the love of”, ի պատիվ “in honor of”. The component words are then still tagged according to their basic use (ի is ADP, սեր is NOUN, etc.) and their status as multiword expressions is accounted for in the syntactic annotation.
Note, that the Armenian ADP covers also “localizers”. These are a closed set of postpositions (traditionally known as “improper adpositions”) which inflect for Case, Number[psor] and Person[psor] and typically indicate spatial information in relation to the noun preceding it. Localizers are still tagged as ADP, but are labeled with additional features and with special dependency relation case:loc.
Here is the list of commonly used localizers: միջի, միջից, միջով, ետևից, հետևից, հետևում, վրայի, վրայից, վրայով, տակի, տակից, տակով, մոտի, մոտից, մոտով, առջևի, առջևից, առջևով.
- Վերցրեց գիրքը սեղանի վրայից։ “He took the book from on the table.”
- Ճանապարհն անցնում էր դաշտերի միջով։ “The road passed through the fields.”
Although a few localizers have further grammaticalized into adverbials denoting spatial concepts, localizers with the adverbial function are still tagged as ADP (but are labeled with additional features and with the dependency relation obl).
- Հետո սկսում ես հետները չշփվել։ “Then you stop communicating with-them.”
Note also, that there is a number of case-marking elements (traditionally called “adpositional words”), derived from a closed set of nouns, adjectivs/participles or adverbs. They are tagged based on their main part-of-speech category in UPOS. Their function as a part of speech, different from that in UPOS, is indicated with the relation ExtPos.
- անհրաժեշտության դեպքում “in case of necessity”
Examples
- Prepositions, postpostions: ի “for the sake of”, առ “up to”, ըստ “according to”, համար “for”, հանդերձ “together with”, պես “as”
- Localizers / postpositions։ մոտ “at”, վրա “on”, մեջ “in”, տակ “under”, առաջ, առջև, դիմաց “before, front side, ahead”
- Case-marking words: հետո “after”
ADP in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [da] [el] [en] [es] [et] [fi] [fro] [fr] [ga] [gn] [grc] [gub] [hu] [hy] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [naq] [nmf] [no] [oge] [pcm] [ps] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tpn] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [xcl] [xmf] [yue] [zh]