Stacked Prepositions
There is a fascinating set of words that exists cross-linguistically, which I like to call stacked prepositions, or stacked postpositions for postpositional languages such as Japanese. Though from this point on, I'll exclusively be referring to either as prepositions. These are words such as onto (on+to), underneath (under+neath); ID daripada (dari+pada; 'than', lit. 'from at'), kepada (ke+pada; 'for', lit. 'to at'); and JP made ni ('by', lit. 'until to'). However, before we get into that, I would like to give y'all a crash course on prepositions.
Prepositions are a syntactic class of words that go before a noun phrase. There are however exceptions to this, which among others are, (1) in phrasal verbs, such as the preposition over in the sentence His parents' death was something he could never get over, and (2) in sentences with intransitive prepositions, such as the preposition before in the sentence He'd left 2 hours before.
Prepositions are deeply interconnected with the concept of grammatical cases (e.g., I, my, me). My hot take is that prepositions and case suffixes that don't represent morphosyntactic alignment should be analysed and grouped under one category, but that's a Peridot post for another day.
Something you may recall from your English classes is that prepositions could represent location, motion, time, relation, or state. Wikipedia states that semantically, English prepositions most commonly represent space and time. However, I strongly believe that due to human intuition, prepositions IN ALL LANGUAGES can only naturally emerge as words that describe location and motion; meanwhile, prepositions for time, relation, or state can only exist by derivation, be it from analogy, inflected words, compound words, loanwords, or other methods. Based on what? I have no evidence—just a hunch. But I do have some examples:
Time: At, by, and after are all spatial prepositions. During is a gerund. Since is a compound.
Relation: Concerning is a gerund; plus it's from French. Because is a compound; it is also of French origin. Of came from off.
State: As is a compound word. Like was an adjective in Proto-Germanic.
Y'all see what I'm getting at?
That aside, I want to come back to stacked prepositions. I think they are fascinating because despite prepositions only being used before nouns, these anomalous words are formed from prepositions being used before PREPOSITIONS! As for why I went on that tangent about prepositions only representing spatial concepts, it is because I think double prepositions stem from ancient humans not yet having enough words to describe complex spatial concepts!
Take onto. Onto is formed by combining on and to. Ancient Europeans probably wanted to convey both motion and direction, as in how does one describe an object headed toward another object, but only to its surface? Or take within. Perhaps it was formed by pleonasm, but eventually semantically shifted such that it now has different usages with in! Or take Indonesian's kepada. The fact that it shifted from a combination of two prepositions, one conveying direction and the other conveying position, into one conveying benefaction—I think that's really awesome!
I could also talk about the semantic shift of spatial prepositions to temporal and state prepositions, but I think this is all I'll be talking about for today. Hope y'all had a great time reading!
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