adposu

Adposu is a term used in linguistic typology to refer to a neutral, umbrella class of units that encode relational meaning and function similarly to adpositions. In some theoretical frameworks, adposu covers prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions, and may include relational affixes when they express the same functions. The term is intended to provide a common label for discussing cross-linguistic behavior without committing to a single morphological type.

The history and usage of adposu vary among authors. The term was proposed to facilitate cross-language comparison of how languages express spatial, temporal, and other relational relations. It is not universally standardized, and many grammars continue to distinguish prepositions and postpositions or circumpositions as separate categories. In empirical work, adposu can serve as a practical label for annotation schemes that aim to be language-agnostic.

In practical terms, adposu can be used to describe several related constructions. Prepositional elements typically appear before the noun phrase, postpositional elements after it, and circumpositional constructions surround a noun phrase with elements on both sides. In computational linguistics and corpus annotation, adposu is sometimes used as a unifying label to tag relational expressions across languages, while still allowing language-specific realizations to be noted in more detailed analyses.

See also: Adposition, preposition, postposition, circumposition, linguistics, linguistic typology.