MA Dissertation Abstract

With few exceptions, linguists tend to neglect adpositions in their research. My dissertation examines them from two different angles: on the one hand, it discusses adpositions in general grammar and can thus help language documenters to identify promising areas of study; and on the other, it shows how such findings can be applied by looking at three West African languages of the Kru family, Grebo, Bete and Dida.

The first part of my thesis deals with adpositions in general grammar. After defining what adpositions are, I treat factors that influence their interpretation, such as dependency relations or predicate meaning. This is followed by a discussion of spatial, temporal and other adpositions. I then turn to three more general questions: how many adpositions do languages typically have? How do adpositions arise diachronically? And what connections are there between the order of adpositions and NPs and the order of other constituents?

The second part of my thesis discusses adpositions in Kru languages. After a typological sketch of Kru languages in general, I deal with the adpositions in Grebo, Bete and Dida. My work on Dida is based on fieldmethods classes attended in spring 2005. As Kru languages have never been described in detail, my descriptions will be supplemented with a list of questions that have to remain unanswered at the moment.