Article preposition
An article preposition is in linguistics an assembly of a preposition and a definite or indefinite article to a new word.
In some cases, an article preposition can no longer be broken down into its constituents. In German , for example, in and that add to im . Under certain circumstances it is created a new context, such as is the doctor , at the beginning is not necessarily the same as at the doctor , at the beginning .
Article prepositions in other languages
Many Romance languages and dialects are very rich in article prepositions. In contrast to German, they are merged into an inseparable unit here and also take on morphosyntactic functions that were taken over in Latin by the declination .
While New Spanish (in contrast to Old Spanish) is very poor in article prepositions ( de + el > del , a + el > al ), Italian and especially Friulian and Portuguese are very rich in these forms. In Italian, the prepositions a , di , da , in and su fuse with the definite articles (in earlier stages of the language also con and per > col (< con + il ), pel (< per + il )) to form al , del , dal , nel and sul (< a + il , di + il ) etc. In Friulian and Portuguese not only the definite but also the indefinite articles merge with the preposition, cf. Friuli. in + il > intal , in + un > intun etc., portug. em + a > na , em + uma > numa etc.
In Romanian the definite article is basically enclitic (e.g. tren-ul - "der Zug", literally "Zug-der"), but the indefinite article can sometimes merge with the preposition: intre + o > intr-o . In French , which had more article prepositions in its medieval language level, still has two contractions for de and à > du or des and au or aux in connection with the articles le and les . In the case of au , the phonetic difference to the pure preposition is so strong that it is no longer recognizable.
literature
- Ulrich Wandruszka: Grammar. Form, function, presentation . Tübingen, Narr: 2007, especially the article preposition chapter , pages 70–75.