Abstract There is a category of “postpositions” in most, if not all, Uralic languages that consists of two types of words: words that take spatial case inflection, and words that do not. These groups also have other morphosyntactic and semantic differences, which suggests that there are actually two distinct word classes instead of one. In this paper, I analyse the morphosyntactic properties of the inflecting “postpositions” that I call relational nouns (RN) and establish a functional prototype of RNs that can be used to distinguish this word class also in other Uralic languages. Regarding the theoretical approach, the study is based on typological research on word classes, which means that the class of RNs is defined based on both semantics and morphosyntax, and the category is seen as having a prototype structure. The aim of this study is to provide a typologically informed description of a newly introduced word class in the Uralic languages.
Riku Erkkilä (Mon,) studied this question.