Ago (was: Most common irregular verbs?)
| From: | Tim May <butsuri@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, January 17, 2006, 15:06 |
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caeruleancentaur wrote at 2006-01-17 04:31:57 (-0000)
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Henrik Theiling <theiling@A...> wrote:
>
> I can see from the other messages that there is some confusion on
> the definition of an adjective. This comes as no surprise since
> there are many debatable areas in the field of languages. But for
> the time being I will call "ago" an adjective because other
> postpositional adjectives do exist in English and to call it a
> postpostion would mean that it's the only one in the English
> language, a situation certainly not impossible, but to me not
> really logical.
No-one's saying "ago" must be a postposition because it comes after a
noun. The argument is that a phrase like "an hour ago" behaves more
like a prepositional phrase headed by "ago" than a noun phrase headed
by "an hour". Determining whether this is a reasonable label means
applying various syntactic tests, which I"ll leave to those more
capable than myself.