zompist bboard

Sometimes I think having access to info about so many other conlangs is harmful to my attitude, as I feel disgusted by some of them, and I envy the creativity or aesthetics of others and fear that I will never be able to measure up. I wish I could muster up the courage to smash my DSL modem and stay...

Well, I wonder if I've stumbled upon a language universal. Maybe postpositional phrases can't modify nouns directly in natlangs, unlike prepositional phrases. It seems like allowing such a thing would be harmless but maybe it causes unpleasant entanglements or "just doesn't feel right" in complex se...

follow-up: I did find this tidbit about Basque: "A postpositional phrase cannot directly modify a NP (de Rijk 1988), but requires the adjectival suffix -ko: gazte-lurako bidea ‘the road to the castle’" from a grammar of Cavineña: "Postpositional phrases cannot function at the NP level, i.e., cannot ...

I'm having trouble finding examples of a certain kind of postpositional phrase in natlangs. I can find plenty of examples containing noun + postposition, which modifies a verb, such as Hungarian a fiú a fa alatt ül the boy sits under the tree but I cannot readily find an example (via googling) of no...