Morphology and syntax of postpositions in Guro (preliminary remarks)

Abstract

The paper presents the preliminary study on the tonal morphology and the syntax of postpositions in Guro. I distinguish the main morphological and syntactic parameters relevant for the description of this part of speech. The description lists the syntactic contexts where postpositions, as well as homonymic locative nouns, adverbs and preverbs, can occur. For each syntactic context, I discuss the criteria that enable us to distinguish between all these homonymic parts of speech. Among other things, I outline new directions for the study of this problem of homonymy using the data on verbal nominalization and relative clauses. The tonal morphology of postpositions has never been discussed on Mande material. However, Guro postpositions manifest non-trivial and complex tonal alternations. The presence of these alternations and their specific character depend not only on the phonetic and phonological context, but also on the semantic features. Tonal alternations can indicate the reference shift, the level of idiomaticity of the phrase, as well as the attributive (vs possessive) relations between the constituents of the phrase. Refs 12. Table 1.

Keywords:

south Mande, Guro, postpositions, syntax, tonal morphology