adposition

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word adposition. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word adposition, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say adposition in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word adposition you have here. The definition of the word adposition will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofadposition, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.

English

Etymology

From ad- +‎ position, from Latin adpositio, from adpositum, past participle of adponere, an alternative form of apponere (to put near).

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈæd.pəˌzɪ.ʃən/

Noun

adposition (plural adpositions)

  1. (grammar) An element that combines syntactically with a phrase and indicates how that phrase should be interpreted in the surrounding context; a preposition or postposition.
    • 2003, Mark C. Baker, Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives, Cambridge University Press, page 303:
      Throughout this book, I have assumed that adpositions (prepositions and postpositions) are not lexical categories, but rather functional categories. [] While this view of adpositions is far from unprecedented, it runs contrary to the more standard generative treatment, championed by Jackendoff (1977: 31-33), in which adpositions constitute a fourth lexical category, filling out the logical space of possibilities defined by the two binary-valued features and .
    • 2008, Amani Bohoussou, Stavros Skopeteas, Grammaticalization of spatial adpositions in Nànáfwê, Elisabeth Verhoeven, Stavros Skopeteas, Yong-Min Shin, Yoko Nishina, Johannes Helmbrecht (editors), Studies on Grammaticalization, Walter de Gruyter (Mouton), page 77,
      It is well known in West African linguistics that languages in this broad sense display adpositions that emerge out of these two sources, namely nouns and verbs.
    • 2010, Claude Hagège, Adpositions, Oxford University Press, page 332:
      By establishing adpositions as a constantly referred to but never really demonstrated language category, this book has provided a basis for the theory of the linguistic category. [] Adpositions could be considered a clear-cut category if one relied on syntax only, for one simple reason: the are specialized in function-marking.

Synonyms

Hyponyms

Derived terms

Translations

Further reading

Finnish

Noun

adposition

  1. genitive singular of adpositio