Four North Saami Ambipositions

We present a study of four North Sámi adpositions that can be used as both prepositions and postpositions and thus be termed “ambipositions”. We advance three hypotheses concerning 1) dialectal differences in use of ambipositions in North Sámi, 2) differences between their use as prepositions and postpositions, and 3) a possible typological correlation between the frequency of ambipositions and the extent to which position is used to differentiate meaning, with North Sámi at the high end of this scale. Our study tests these hypotheses against two databases representing the use of ambipositions in newspapers and in literature. The data consists of example sentences tagged for the position of the adposition, the meaning of the adposition and the source of the sentence. Chi-square tests are used to show where there are significant differences between the prepositional and postpositional uses and between uses in the eastern, central, and western portions of the North Saami dialect continuum.