ADP: adposition
Definition
An adposition is a word that links a nominal to its head. Adpositions are often subdivided into prepositions and postpositions depending on whether they precede or succeed the nominal. (In addition, there exist circumpositions, which are discontiguous expressions that enclose the nominal.)
Clarifications on how to distinguish ADP from SCONJ, PART and VERB, and on fixed expressions:
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In many languages, words that function as adpositions may also be used to mark adverbial clauses, like [en] before and after. If one of the functions is clearly dominant, the tag corresponding to that function (
ADPor SCONJ) should be used for all occurrences, and the difference in syntactic function be marked only by the syntactic relation (case vs. mark). If both functions are equally regular, then the tag may alternate with the syntactic relation (case/ADPvs.mark/SCONJ). -
Note that in Germanic languages, some prepositions may also function as verbal particles, as in give in or hold on. They are still tagged
ADPand not PART. -
A common pathway of grammaticalization is from verbs to adpositions. Along this pathway of grammaticalization, it is common to have words with roughly their original verbal meaning and belonging to the inflectional paradigm of an extant verb with suitable verbal morphology but functioning in a sentence as a preposition, with certain syntactic tests or finer-grained semantic criteria suggesting that they are prepositions (for example, they have no understood subject). These words have variously been called deverbal prepositions, deverbal connectives, quasi-prepositions, or pseudo-prepositions. In English this includes words like following, concerning, regarding, and given. Similar cases occur in many other languages (such as French concernant and suivant). For UD, we have decided that such words will be given the POS VERB and normal verbal morphological features, but they can be recognized as syntactically adpositions by giving them the grammatical relation case or mark. Conversely, in cases where there is no longer an extant verb or any still existent verb has a quite different meaning, grammaticalization is viewed as complete and the POS should be ADP. In English this would apply to pending or during (from the disused verb dure: “The wood being preserv’d dry will dure a very long time” – Evelyn 1664).
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In many languages, adpositions can take the form of fixed multiword expressions. The component words are grouped together with the fixed relation.
Examples
- of
- from
- during
References
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]