A minimalist approach to the syntax of p
A Romance perspective
This paper proposes a minimalist analysis of locative prepositions in Central Catalan, from a comparative perspective.
Specifically, I claim that certain semantic and syntactic properties that are usually considered part of the field of the extended
projection of PPs in cartographic approaches (categories like Place, Degree, K, and AxPart, for example) are in fact properties of the DP in
the complement of a preposition. This claim takes the view that adpositions are a functional projection that relates two DPs, the Figure and
the Ground, and not a lexical head that projects a functional domain on its own, as Ns, Vs or As (cf.
den Dikken 2010;
Koopman 2000). The final part of the paper proposes a model to account
for the variation that locative prepositions exhibit across Romance languages following the Conjecture of
Borer (1984) (known as the Borer-Chomsky Conjecture since
Baker 2008).
More precisely, I propose a model in which microparametric differences among Romance simple locative prepositions depend on the particular
composition of features in
p.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Prepositions in Central Catalan: A comparative perspective
- 2.1Spatial adverbials
- 2.2
Simple Ps in Romance: The case of a and en in Central Catalan
- 2.3Complex PPs in Central Catalan: Axial terms as nouns
- 2.4Interim summary
- 3.The structure of pPs
- 3.1Theoretical framework
- 3.2The syntax of DPs
- 3.3Putting DPs in place
- 3.4Understanding Axial Parts
- 3.5The fine structure of adpositions
- 4.Variation in place
- 5.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References (112)
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