Friday, October 24, 2014

Detail #111: Noun Classifiers and Prepositions

It seems it could be quite possible for prepositions to develop into classifiers.

Consider 'I want five of those'. In some varieties of colloquial Swedish, certain mass nouns seem to sometimes take prepositions when preceded by words like 'mera' (more) or similar, although I currently fail at finding the examples I have seen in recent newspapers (of the Finland-Swedish variety).

One could easily imagine a situation then where different kinds of nouns prefer different prepositions, so you get a situation whereby e.g. more with time, more of salt, four of perch, any by friend, some on chieftain, etc.  Of course, what preposition is used is determined by the noun to the right, rather than by the quantifier (or determiner) to the left.

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