Adpositions

Adpositions in IPSL

Postpostiions and prepositions comprise the category of Adpositions that appear after or before the Nouns, respectively, to indicate location. Spoken languages use the position of the adposition (after or before) in relation to the Noune to mark the “type” of the language. For example, SOV languages (Subject-Object-Verb as the basic word order), generally show postpositions rather than prepositions, that is, the adposition appears after the Noun, or, in terms of symbols, N-P rather than P-N. For example, Assamese, Bangla, Hindi, Manipuri, Malayalam, Marathi, etc., all are N-P type of languages and they also happen to be SOV languages, whereas English, French, Dutch, German, Mandarin, Vietnamese are all P-N languages and they also happen to be SVO languages.

Some examples of IPSL adpositions are depicted below.

Postpositions in IPSL

Note that the term being used here is adpositions and not either post- or pre-positions. So the obvious question that arises is whether the adpositions in IPSL are post- or pre- positions. The answer is not easy to formulate. This is mainly because of the typical property of IPSL (and Sign Languages in general) to incorporate the adposition onto/ into the noun itself or sometime to the Verb. However, this is a topic of a much larger consequences, to do with temporality and spatiality of sign languages, and will be dealt with separately.