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Expressions like English ago have been claimed to be among the most likely candidates for postposition crosslinguistically, and the reason for this has been conjectured to be diachronic. A few previous contributions notwithstanding, however, we still lack a typologically wider-ranging account of such temporal adpositions and adverbials and of how they develop. These are the main goals of the present article. Relying on a sample of 100 languages, it has been found that: (i) the structure instantiated in English by ago is far from universal and is geographically unevenly distributed; (ii) these expressions are indeed predominantly postposed, which does not hold for their mirror images for the future; and (iii) evidence from etymology, patterns of polysemy, and documented semantic extensions suggests that this asymmetry is the result of past and future markers having different diachronic sources.

Fratini et al. (Fratini et al. 2014, Frequency and morphological irregularity are independent variables. Evidence from a corpus study of Spanish verbs. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 10[2]. 289–314) concluded that frequency and morphological irregularity are in Spanish, unlike in English, independent variables. In this paper, I take issue with that claim. On the one hand, it is argued that the borders between regularity and irregularity are diffuse, many of the verbs they classify as irregular might, therefore, not be so. In addition, the choice of lexemes they analyzed was far from adequate. Their set of irregular verbs contained many verbs formed by adding some prefix to a more frequent irregular verb (e. g. a-venir, a-tener, con-decir, con-mover, etc.) and many highly infrequent lexemes in general, barely in use in the speech community (e. g. abnegar, ablandecer, amoblar, amodorrecer, etc.). In an alternative corpus analysis, it has been found that, when these and other shortcomings in their research are dealt with, morphological irregularity and frequency are indeed strongly correlated variables also in Spanish.