Re: THEORY: Adpositional Heads

At 04:06 PM 9/10/03 -0400, you wrote:
>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
In this particular case, the prepositional phrase is adverbial.  It
modifies "saw."  I saw a man *where*?  I saw a man *in the house.*

I was recently teaching my daughter to diagram sentences, and you have to
work hard at teaching them where to put the prepositional phrases.  Before
they can know where to put them in the diagram, they have to be able to
identify them as either adverbial or adjectival.

Now, if you turn that sentence around and say something like "The man in
the house was fixing dinner." then you have an adjectival prepositional
phrase modifying "man."  *Which* man was fixing dinner?  The man *in the
house* was fixing dinner.

Isidora

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