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In this paper we investigate the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in Greek. We argue that their distribution supports an analysis, according to which agentive/instrument and causer PPs are licensed by distinct functional heads, respectively. We argue against a conceivable alternative analysis, which links agentivity and causation to the prepositions themselves. We furthermore identify a particular type of Voice head in Greek anticausative realised by non-active Voice morphology.
In this paper we compare the distribution of PPs introducing external arguments in nominalizations with PPs introducing external arguments in the verbal domain. We show that several mismatches exist between the behavior of PPs in nominalizations and PPs in the verbal domain. This leads us to suggest that while PPs in the verbal domain are licensed by functional structure alone, within the nominal domain, PPs can also be licensed via an interplay of the encyclopaedic meaning of the root involved and the properties of the preposition itself. This second mechanism kicks in in the absence of functional structure.
Preposition-noun combinations (PNCs) are compositional and productive, but not fully regular. In school grammars and many theoretical approaches, PNCs are neglected, but they have recently been addressed in an HPSG analysis by Baldwin et al. (2006). After discussing some basic properties of PNCs, we show that statistical methods can be employed to prove that PNCs are indeed productive and compositional, which again implies that PNCs should receive a syntactic analysis. Such an analysis, however, is impeded by the limited regularity of the construction. We will point out why adding semantic conditions to syntactic schemata might be necessary but not sufficient and turn then to a framework which allows the derivation of syntactic (and semantic) generalizations from linguistic data without taking recourse to introspective judgments.