Small Musing on Prepositions Governing Case

Most conlangers who are probably aware of how in several languages - Latin, German, Russian as prime examples - prepositions alter meaning depending on which case they are used with. In Indo-European languages, dative often goes with location, and accusative often with direction. Alternatively, in say Russian, there's the prepositional and instrumental cases that both are paired with the accusative to the same effect.

However, we're also aware that word order can distinguish subjects from objects and other similar distinctions. In addition, we know other things can distinguish subject from object - lexical knowledge about which noun out of two is more likely to be the subject in general, which noun is more likely to be the subject or object of which verb, etc.

Compare how in English, 'at' can be quite locative at times, and quite directional at other times. In part this seems to correlate* with whether it's a syntactic complement of the verb or not, more locative in nature the less complementy it is. (Here, I am thinking of complement in the way that the object is a syntactic complement.) 

So, maybe we could have the difference between a preposition being locative or directional as a result of word order in the sentence - S Prep N O V = S at N O V, S O Prep N V = S O towards N V.

And to make it better, turn this into a statistical likelihood, i.e. O Prep N is more likely to mean 'towards' than to mean 'at', but that there still is a significant probability for the meaning to be 'at'.

* Have not checked this and won't check it. It's purely a gut feeling, and I am not going to base what essentially is a speculation about how a language might work on whether this gut feeling is correct or not.