Re: THEORY: Adpositional Heads

On Wed, 10 Sep 2003 12:39:50 -0600, Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...>
wrote:

>If you consider the noun to be the head of a PP, you're claiming that
>the phrasal category is NP. One way to argue for this would be to show
>that NPs introduced by prepositions have the same syntactic
>distribution as NPs without prepositions. If you could show this, then
>your case is stronger.
I'm sorry but I'm unsure as to what you mean by "syntactic distribution."

However, the human mind seems to consider adpositions to be more
significant than their objects.

>In some languages functions carried by PPs are in fact carried by NPs;
>the P-like element in those languages is inflectional in nature (think
>Finnish cases). But even these languages generally have PPs headed by
>an adposition.
It seems to me that the origin of PPs is easier to discern in (originally)
left-branching languages, such as Finnish.  Especially in Finnish, you can
see that postpositions were originally nouns, since the objects of
postpositions generally take the genitive.  So, where in English you would
have "inside the house," in a more left-branching language you would have
something like *"house's inside".

I also think that PPs can be very "fuzzy" or context-dependent.  For
example, take the English sentence "I saw a man in the house."  What part
of the sentence does "in the house" modify?  Does it modify "(a) man,"
or "saw," or "I"?  This may be partly English's fault, since it has
relatively free word-order when it comes to PPs.

- Rob

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