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Les prépositions complexes dans les langues romanes
Edited by Benjamin Fagard, José Pinto De Lima and Dejan Stosic
[Revue Romane 54:1] 2019
► pp. 93–125

Complex spatial prepositions from Latin to Castilian

| University of Erfurt

From among the various processes that form prepositions in the history from Latin to Castilian, the investigation concentrates on the formation of prepositional adverbs like Spanish delante (de) ‘in front (of)’. There are two mechanisms for their formation: (a) An adverb or a preposition is preceded by a superordinate simple local preposition which initially specifies a local relation, but ends up as a reinforcing expansion of its base; and (b) an adverb is converted into a preposition by a following functional preposition which serves as a relationalizer.

In case #a, the syntactic structure is often destroyed by univerbation, and the resulting reinforced preposition is lexicalized. In case #b, the alternation between adverb and relationalized preposition is regular and bidirectional, so that the combination of adverb and relationalizer is normally not univerbated. The exception desde is given some attention.

As a result, the formation of prepositions of this structure is, at the outset, not a matter of word formation, and such complex prepositions are therefore not compound prepositions, but instead lexicalized univerbations.

Keywords: complex preposition, univerbation, compounding, lexicalization
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Basic concepts
    • 1.1Case relators
    • 1.2Local relations
    • 1.3Prepositional adverbs
  • 2.Prehistory of Romance prepositions
  • 3.Preposition and case government
  • 4.Formation of adpositions
  • 5.Formation of prepositional adverbs
    • 5.1Optional complements
    • 5.2Relationalization
  • 6.Superordinate prepositions
    • 6.1Prepositional adverb from simple preposition plus prepositional adverb
      • 6.1.1Semantosyntactic motivation
      • 6.1.2Latin
      • 6.1.3Castilian
    • 6.2Adverb from simple preposition plus adverb
      • 6.2.1Informative and redundant combinations
      • 6.2.2The attrition of the ablative
    • 6.3Preposition from simple preposition plus preposition
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 July 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.00017.leh
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