"A lexical item that is of the 'grammatical' type (which type includes at least conjunctions and adpositions) cannot be included in the set of properties borrowed from a language unless the rule that determines its linear order with respect to its head is also borrowed." (source)Eitan Grossman presented a number of apparent counterexamples – in fact, he reported that fully one-third of his sample of languages with borrowed adpositions displayed counterexamples. His effort to systematically test the hypothesis is laudable. However, the results cannot be taken at face value. Many examples, on closer examination, turn out to be amenable to one of three alternative explanations:
- The adposition was originally borrowed as a preposition, and turned into a postposition in the course of a more general typological realignment of the language. (This applies to Sri Lanka Malay dative nang, ultimately from a Javanese preposition; Authier et al. presented a new example, an apudlocative preposition possibly borrowed from Tatic into Georgian: Tatic (b)-tan N > old Georgian tan-a N > modern Georgian N-tan.)
- The source language order is not necessarily as postulated. (Thus the Khorasan Turkish postposition tā is assumed to be from Persian, in which it is a preposition, but could also derive from neighbouring Mazanderani, in which it is a postposition.)
- The "adposition" is also used without a complement in the source language (eg as a noun or adverb), and hence was not necessarily borrowed as an adposition. (This applies, for instance, to the Brahui postposition savā "without", connected at some remove to Persian سوا sevā "separate, other", or to the Manambu postposition wantaim "with", from Tok Pisin wantaim "together (adv.) / with (prep.)". In some cases the adverb is unambiguously the source, for instance Turkish raǧmen "despite", from the Arabic adverb raghman رغما rather than the preposition raghma رغم.)
Petros Karatsareas gave a nice summary of the situation in Cappadocian Greek (cf. Dawkins 1916), which has taken advantage of Greek's word order flexibility to move a long way towards developing postpositions; relational nouns which in Medieval Greek normally preceded their complement came to obligatorily follow it, yielding circumpositions (governing the genitive) whose prepositional component then became optional. This strategy was in turn used for borrowing Turkish adpositions.
Riho Grünthal pointed out the striking rarity of borrowed prepositions on Finno-Ugric, even in languages such as Finnish or Saami that (as a result of contact) have developed prepositions. This seems to confirm a point that I had also made in regard to Northern Songhay: that it's much easier to borrow adpositions when they have the same syntax in the source and target languages. He did find one or two cases, though, notably Livonian pa, from Latvian. Brigitte Pakendorf showed that Even borrows a fair number of Yakut postpositions (with varying degrees of acceptance among speakers), but no Russian prepositions, which at first sight seems to confirm the role of congruence even more. However, it's also true that Yakut has influenced Even much longer than Russian has.
Edith Moravcsik herself finally gave a summing-up address, in the form of an outline of relevant factors that need to be considered in the typology of adposition/case marker borrowing, with allusions to the talks given; she didn't focus particularly on her original generalisation, and she gave the impression of seeing it as being only statistically true in light of the proposed counterexamples.
I won't go into detail on the contributions that did not directly address Moravcsik's generalisation here, since this is already getting too long for a blog post, but some were also very interesting. Notably, Bakker and Hekking revealed that, whereas Quechua and Guarani make little use of Spanish adpositions, Otomí has massively adopted them – probably because Otomí, unlike the other two, had no morphemes serving such a function before contact, leaving it to context.
Much work remains to be done on the topic. Do you know any prepositions that have been borrowed as postpositions, or vice versa?