Postpozisyon

Postpozisyon (Turkish for postposition) in linguistics refers to an adposition that follows its complement, the counterpart of a preposition. In languages with postpositions, the noun or noun phrase bonds with a particle or word after it to express relations such as location, direction, possession, or other functional roles. Postpositions may appear as separate words after the noun or as suffixes attached to the noun, depending on the language's morphology.

Distribution and function: Postpositions are common in several language families, notably East Asian languages like Japanese and Korean, Turkic languages such as Turkish, and various Caucasian and Finno-Ugric languages. They are especially prevalent in agglutinative systems where grammatical relations are marked by affixes; in other languages, they exist as standalone particles after the noun. They can encode locative, directional, genitive/possessive, instrumental, or comitative roles, among others.

Typology and relation to prepositions: The primary distinction from prepositions is purely positional: postpositions follow the noun, while prepositions precede it. Semantically, they fulfill similar adpositional functions, but the surrounding syntax and morphology differ across languages. Some languages express these relations with suffixes on the noun (as in Turkish), while others use separate postposed particles (as in Japanese).

Examples: Turkish displays postpositional forms such as önünde meaning "in front of" (evin önünde = in front of the house). Japanese uses post-nominal particles like ga and o to mark subject or object after the noun. These cases illustrate how postpositions contribute to grammatical structure without relying on preposed adpositions.