Re: THEORY: Adpositional Heads

On Wednesday, September 10, 2003, at 10:45  AM, Rob Haden wrote:

> In the grammars of most languages, when discussiong adpositional (post-
> /prepositional) phrases, the adpositions are treated as the heads.
> What's
> the reasoning for this?  It seems counter-intuitive to me.  My opinion
> is
> that, at least in many languages (like English), the "objects" of the
> adpositional phrases are the heads, and the adpositions themselves are
> modifiers.  What do y'all think?
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.

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.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie