(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.
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_:vb6852010
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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 +\!/\!\!-\!\!\mathsf N and +\!/\!\!-\!\!\mathsf V.
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2003, Mark C. Baker, Lexical Categories: Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives, Cambridge University Press, page 303:
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_:vb6852011
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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.
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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,
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_:vb6852012
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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.
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2010, Claude Hagège, Adpositions, Oxford University Press, page 332: