ADP: adposition
Definition
Adposition is a cover term for prepositions and postpositions. Adpositions belong to a closed set of items that occur before (preposition) or after (postposition) a complement composed of a noun phrase, noun, pronoun, or clause that functions as a noun phrase, and that form a single structure with the complement to express its grammatical and semantic relation to another unit within a clause.
In many languages, adpositions can take the form of fixed multiword
expressions, such as in spite of, because of, thanks to. The
component words are then still tagged according to their basic use
(in is ADP, spite is NOUN, etc.) and their status as
multiword expressions are accounted for in the syntactic annotation.
Note that in Germanic languages, some prepositions may also function
as verbal particles, as in give in or hold on. They
are still tagged ADP and 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).
Examples
- in
- to
- 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] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tpn] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [xcl] [yue] [zh]