From N to particle
Prepositionless home in the dialects of Northern Italy
The paper addresses the distribution of preposition-drop with the noun casa ‘home’ in the spatial adpositions of some Northern Italian varieties. It is shown that in these varieties P-less home behaves syntactically as a locative adverb, which under specific circumstances, becomes a particle. It is suggested that P-less home is not a special noun but a proper member of the category P generated in a specific projection in the fine-grained PP (Cinque 2010), hosting viewpoint modifiers of the silent head PLACE. The adverb vs. particle nature of P-less home derives from motivated movements inside and outside the PP triggered by a directional context. The same analysis is extended to Modern (and Old) English home.