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Lexical and functional adpositions: the view from <em>of</em> in Old and present-day English

Paper · 2022 · Roxanne Taylor

Summary

The paper asks what actually separates lexical adpositions from functional ones. Is there a clean split into two subclasses or a gradient, and which properties carry the difference? Taylor approaches this "bottom up". She does not assume diagnostic criteria in advance. Instead she compares corpus usage of a single adposition at two stages: Old English of, usually treated as lexical and roughly meaning "from" (ablatival), and present-day English of, widely considered functional. The comparison covers syntax, morphophonology, semantics, and variation with case and with other adpositions. A short look at early Middle English adds an intermediate stage. The main finding is that the two differ chiefly in semantics, namely in how many relations they can express. Syntax stays largely continuous, and the alternation with case or with other adpositions does not set them apart. The author concludes that the lexical/functional contrast among adpositions is small, multifaceted, and graded, and that adpositions as a category lean toward the functional side. This has implications for grammaticalization theory.

Key points

  • The case study rests on English's attestation history of roughly 1250 years. Present-day of is one of the standard examples of a functional adposition, alongside to, French à and French de.
  • The difference between Old English of and present-day of lies mainly in semantic range. Syntax, morphophonology and replaceability by case are not major points of difference.
  • Old English of already alternated with the genitive, much as present-day of alternates with the s-possessive. Together with present-day of varying with other, including lexical, adpositions, this counts against treating of as the head of a Kase Phrase, i.e. as a mere case marker.
  • Today of stops being an adposition only in a few adverbial uses, such as hedges and the phrase of course. These are cases with some sign of word-boundary loss.
  • Part-whole uses of of precede and outnumber possessive ones in Old English. This challenges the accepted path in which partitive meaning develops from possessive meaning.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Instead of testing a predefined checklist of diagnostics, compare two related items property by property and let the differences emerge; this avoids confirming assumed categories.
  • I2. Treat "lexical vs functional" as a graded scale rather than a binary label, with the number of semantic relations an item can mark as the main measure.
  • I3. Use alternation as a probe: check whether an item varies with a morphological construction (genitive, s-possessive) or with other adpositions to judge its status.
  • I4. Distinguish part-whole from possessive readings of of explicitly, since they are separate relation types with their own history rather than one variant of the other.
  • I5. The few places where of stops behaving as an adposition (hedges, of course) are exactly where word boundaries erode.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): When evaluating why a parser or tagger treats two items differently, first diff their observed behaviour across corpora before writing hand rules, so that repair rules come from evidence rather than presumption.
  • I2 (frames): Give each preposition a recorded inventory of the relations it can signal. Highly polysemous ones like of then trigger contextual disambiguation, while narrow ones map almost directly to a role.
  • I3 (world): Normalise X of Y and Y's X to the same possession or part-whole link in the world model, while keeping the lexical alternatives distinct.
  • I4 (world): Store part-whole and ownership as different edge types in the entity graph, so holdings and composition questions get answered from the right relation.
  • I5 (tokens): Treat such sequences as multiword units with an adverbial tag before parsing, so the parser does not attach a spurious ADP.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of ManchesterManchester · United Kingdom87 works · 44,938 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Roxanne Taylor. 2022. Lexical and functional adpositions: the view from <em>of</em> in Old and present-day English. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.5895

@article{taylor2022lexical,
  title = {{Lexical and functional adpositions: the view from <em>of</em> in Old and present-day English}},
  author = {Roxanne Taylor},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.5895},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5895}
}

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