Postpositional phrases following nouns

[dɮ the phoneme]

One of my languages, Hhotakotí, uses a mix of both prepositions and postpositions, with both phrase types able to modify verbs and nouns. However, it has both the prepositional- and postpositional-phrases following the noun they modify. Is this attested? Postpositional phrases that follow the nouns they modify?

[hwhatting]

Could you give some examples?

[Kuchigakatai]

He's talking about the order of a PP and the modified noun. Unfortunately, there is no WALS chapter for this, and it's also something that very often grammars do not bother or think of covering. An example would be "The man from Germany hadn't noticed this before."

I was suspicious this might be attested in languages with postpositions and VO order, so I checked Dickens' Ju|'hoan grammar, Hagman's Khoekhoe grammar, Collins and Gruber's ǂHoa grammar, White's Finnish grammar, Wilbur's Pite Saami grammar, and, just to check if I was lucky, Törkenczy's very brief Hungarian grammar.

None of them covered this, only discussing PPs as modifiers of verbs. It sucks.

[dɮ the phoneme]

It's surprising to me that this isn't something more grammars would cover, given that, in English at least, it's a fairly common structure. Thanks for searching through all those grammars though, Ser.

Could you give some examples?

In Hhotakotí, there are postpositional phrases, such as

sílijin cho
síli-jin cho
door-DEF LOC
"at the door"

which can modify nouns, like

waudínjin sílijin cho
waudín-jin síli-jin cho
man-DEF door-DEF LOC
"the man at the door"

the thing is, when a noun in a postpositional phrases is itself modified by a postpositional phrase, things starts to look kind of odd to me:

waudínjin sílijin waoanyu ba cho
waudín-jin síli-jin wao-anyu ba cho
man-DEF door-DEF house-1POSS GEN LOC
"the man at the door of my house"

with the postpositions all chaining up at the end. So this is something that I thought may not actually be attested, given that it feels like it could get "unwieldy". That said, if a natlang actually does this, I'm fine with it, but after searching around on WALS, and looking through grammars of a couple of West African languages that I know have similar-ish syntax to what I'm going for with Hhotakotí, I couldn't find anything on it.

[hwhatting]

Well, German has mainly prepositions, but a few of them can also be used as postpositions (die Straße entlang "along the road", der Aussicht wegen "for the view"), but as far as I can see, only prepositional phrases can be used as attributes to nouns, and they then follow the noun, like in English. Russian also has one such preposition + postposition (radi "for the sake of"), and the rules seem to be the same as in German.
In those strict SOV languages I know, postpositional constructions always precede the noun, linked with a special suffix (e.g. Kazakh:
кәсіпорындар үшінгі тариф
käsiporyn-dar üshin-gi tarif
enterprise-PL for-SUFFIX tariff
enterprise tariff
I think it would make sense to see how your language decides between pre- and postpositions in other cases and to apply the same principles for this case? E.g. in the example of German, postpositional phrases can only be used as adverbials, so your question doesn't come up. This ties in with the reason German has postpositions at all; it's because German allows both V2 and verb-final constructions.

[hwhatting]

waudínjin sílijin cho
waudín-jin síli-jin cho
man-DEF door-DEF LOC
"the man at the door"

...

waudínjin sílijin waoanyu ba cho
waudín-jin síli-jin wao-anyu ba cho
man-DEF door-DEF house-1POSS GEN LOC
"the man at the door of my house"

Seems we posted simultaneously. From my knowledge of languages using postpositions, having postpositional phrases follow a noun they modify simply feels wrong, they should precede it.

[Kuchigakatai]

I'd like to think this is attested though, as I don't *feel* it's wrong. It's hard to tell from grammar books because this tends to not be covered, but perhaps someone here is familiar with non-European languages that use postpositions such as Malayalam, Hindi-Urdu, Tibetan, Navajo, Lakhota, Osage, Burmese, Georgian, Quechua... It's possible that one of these languages does it, at least some of the time.

Does it sound more natural to you if the noun received head-marking?

This thread should be moved to the Languages subforum, too, as it's about natural languages.

[Raholeun]

waudínjin sílijin waoanyu ba cho
waudín-jin síli-jin wao-anyu ba cho
man-DEF door-DEF house-1POSS GEN LOC
"the man at the door of my house"

What is the use of the 1POSS-affix combined with the GEN?

[Zaarin]

It's surprising to me that this isn't something more grammars would cover, given that, in English at least, it's a fairly common structure. Thanks for searching through all those grammars though, Ser.

Could you give some examples?

In Hhotakotí, there are postpositional phrases, such as

sílijin cho
síli-jin cho
door-DEF LOC
"at the door"

which can modify nouns, like

waudínjin sílijin cho
waudín-jin síli-jin cho
man-DEF door-DEF LOC
"the man at the door"

the thing is, when a noun in a postpositional phrases is itself modified by a postpositional phrase, things starts to look kind of odd to me:

waudínjin sílijin waoanyu ba cho
waudín-jin síli-jin wao-anyu ba cho
man-DEF door-DEF house-1POSS GEN LOC
"the man at the door of my house"

with the postpositions all chaining up at the end. So this is something that I thought may not actually be attested, given that it feels like it could get "unwieldy". That said, if a natlang actually does this, I'm fine with it, but after searching around on WALS, and looking through grammars of a couple of West African languages that I know have similar-ish syntax to what I'm going for with Hhotakotí, I couldn't find anything on it.

I think Sumerian did something like this. I don't have my Sumerian grammar with me at the moment, but I'll check later.

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

waudínjin sílijin waoanyu ba cho
waudín-jin síli-jin wao-anyu ba cho
man-DEF door-DEF house-1POSS GEN LOC
"the man at the door of my house"

What is the use of the 1POSS-affix combined with the GEN?

I think that would be the "of" in "the door of my house".

[Raholeun]

How silly of me.

[hwhatting]

@Ser: those languages that I know well that have postpositions in more than a couple of exceptios all are relatively strictly head-final, so the word order of Max's examples feels wrong to me in total, not just with regard to the postpositional phrase. So it would indeed be good to see examples from languages that really can mix prepositions and postpositions, or that make substantial use of postpositions without being head-final in noun phrases. Perhaps Farsi might qualify?

[Kuchigakatai]

I asked this question in another language forum, and this is attested in Romani, Finnish and Georgian. Thread closed!

• kirja pöydän päällä (Finnish)
  book table on
  'a book on the table'
  (note: this is marked as formal, carefully specifying the book is *on* the table, normally you'd use the superessive case: kirja pöydällä)
  
  საუბარი ჩვენს შესახებ (Georgian)
  conversation 1PL.GEN about
  'a conversation about us'

[zompist]

Arguably this happens in the Germanic language English:

the house by the sea
that day a few years ago

Admittedly we don't normally think of "ago" as a postposition, but I think we should.

[gach]

• kirja pöydän päällä (Finnish)
  book table on
  'a book on the table'
  (note: this is marked as formal, carefully specifying the book is *on* the table, normally you'd use the superessive case: kirja pöydällä)

It's a bit marked, though how formal it is is somewhat a question of style and one's own idiom. Anyway, it's something that's more likely to occur when you are consciously choosing the construction, whether you are using it in the literary register or in colloquial speech.

Given that postpositions are typically relational nouns in Finnish, it's actually not that weird construction at all. It parallels nicely with other locational phrases which share the morphosyntax exactly but where the locative noun (ranta = "shore" in the latter example) cannot be used as a postposition (unlike pää- = "on" ~ pää = "head"). Compare

kirja pöydä-n pää-llä
book table-GEN on-ADE
"a book on the table"

with

talo järve-n ranna-lla
house lake-GEN shore-ADE
"a house on the shore of the lake"

I'd personally call the latter example fairly normal and unmarked.