3 ms·

"Ago" is kind of agglutinative. In english it isn't used by itself. It's pretty much a suffix even though by convention it is it's own word.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
There are good reasons to think of it as being a word. For example, much like the particle 's, it applies to a phrase without being at all concerned with what word it modifies. (Think "a week and a half ago"; which word would you argue "ago" is being suffixed to?) Does this make it different in any meaningful way from an agglutinative morpheme? No, obviously not. Whether to call a language "agglutinative" is already more a question of cosmetics than facts. It reminds me of the feature tagging guidance on Universal Dependencies, which notes that no language can ever simultaneously have "gender" and "noun class" features, because they are the same thing. If there are three or fewer, the feature is called "gender"; if more, "noun class".
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  It applies to week-and-a-half, which is a phrase only because there's not a word like fortnight means "two weeks"...
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    It applies to a phrase in all cases. If you don't like "a week and a half", you should rethink your approach to the problem, but you can still consider examples like "five years and fifteen days ago".
bloak 2y ago
It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. (Is there another thing like that in English? I can't think of one, though there's one in German: entlang) Etymologically it's a past participle: three days agone (gone) => three days ago
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. (Is there another thing like that in English? I can't think of one, though there's one in German: entlang) There are some similar constructions: - Three days hence. (archaic) - Three days later. - Three days beforehand. - Three days afterwards. I failed to think of one that didn't have to do with time. You could think of "three days later" as being supposed to have a complement supplied to later, as in "three days later [than that]", but interestingly enough this isn't possible for "beforehand" or "afterwards". --- postscript: I think this can be conflated with a general syntactic possibility in English. I can describe an establishment as being "one floor up" from some other contextually-determined establishment, or, as with later, I can make that relationship explicit by saying "one floor up from [wherever]". This is also similar to the bog-standard measurement construction that gets you phrases like "three feet tall".
  - Angostura 2y ago
    I like your antipenultimate example
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Three days later? What about it?
- bradrn 2y ago
  > It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. Called a ‘postposition’. And that’s precisely what ‘ago’ is!
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    The nonjudgmental term of art appears to be "adposition". It isn't clear to me why this was coined as "adposition" and not "apposition". "Preposition" is already something of an unnatural word class. They have two main functions in English: to describe some kind of location ("Sam? He's with Natasha"), and to mark certain arguments to verbs ("The tools? Sam's playing with them"). It's just a coincidence that prepositions serve both of these purposes in English; in Mandarin, the same two purposes are served by completely separate word classes. Verb argument markers are preposed; location markers are postposed.
Shorel 2y ago
In linguistics, such usage is called collocation. Agglutination is a different concept.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

There are good reasons to think of it as being a word. For example, much like the particle 's, it applies to a phrase without being at all concerned with what word it modifies. (Think "a week and a half ago"; which word would you argue "ago" is being suffixed to?) Does this make it different in any meaningful way from an agglutinative morpheme? No, obviously not. Whether to call a language "agglutinative" is already more a question of cosmetics than facts. It reminds me of the feature tagging guidance on Universal Dependencies, which notes that no language can ever simultaneously have "gender" and "noun class" features, because they are the same thing. If there are three or fewer, the feature is called "gender"; if more, "noun class".

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
It applies to week-and-a-half, which is a phrase only because there's not a word like fortnight means "two weeks"...
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  It applies to a phrase in all cases. If you don't like "a week and a half", you should rethink your approach to the problem, but you can still consider examples like "five years and fifteen days ago".

bloak 2y ago

It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. (Is there another thing like that in English? I can't think of one, though there's one in German: entlang) Etymologically it's a past participle: three days agone (gone) => three days ago

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. (Is there another thing like that in English? I can't think of one, though there's one in German: entlang) There are some similar constructions: - Three days hence. (archaic) - Three days later. - Three days beforehand. - Three days afterwards. I failed to think of one that didn't have to do with time. You could think of "three days later" as being supposed to have a complement supplied to later, as in "three days later [than that]", but interestingly enough this isn't possible for "beforehand" or "afterwards". --- postscript: I think this can be conflated with a general syntactic possibility in English. I can describe an establishment as being "one floor up" from some other contextually-determined establishment, or, as with later, I can make that relationship explicit by saying "one floor up from [wherever]". This is also similar to the bog-standard measurement construction that gets you phrases like "three feet tall".
- Angostura 2y ago
  I like your antipenultimate example
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Three days later? What about it?
bradrn 2y ago
> It's more like a preposition that exceptionally comes after the noun phrase instead of before it. Called a ‘postposition’. And that’s precisely what ‘ago’ is!
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  The nonjudgmental term of art appears to be "adposition". It isn't clear to me why this was coined as "adposition" and not "apposition". "Preposition" is already something of an unnatural word class. They have two main functions in English: to describe some kind of location ("Sam? He's with Natasha"), and to mark certain arguments to verbs ("The tools? Sam's playing with them"). It's just a coincidence that prepositions serve both of these purposes in English; in Mandarin, the same two purposes are served by completely separate word classes. Verb argument markers are preposed; location markers are postposed.

Shorel 2y ago

In linguistics, such usage is called collocation. Agglutination is a different concept.