Verbs (V), adjectives (A), nouns (N) and adpositions (P) constitute the four major word classes. The present volume deals with adpositions and their projections (adpositional phrases or PPs). The general introduction in Chapter 1 provides a survey of the most distinctive syntactic, semantic and morphological characteristics of adpositions. Like the other categories, adpositions can project: in other words, they select complements and can be modified, which will be discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, respectively. After this, we will have a closer look at the syntactic uses of the adpositional phrases in Chapter 4. This study will be concluded...

This chapter provides a more general discussion of adpositions and their projections (adpositional phrases). Section 1.1 starts by providing a general characterization of the category of adpositions. Section 1.2 and 1.3 continue by discussing two possible ways of classifying the adpositions. The first classification is based on the relative position of the adpositions with respect to their complement (if any), which results in distinguishing the following four subclasses: prepositions, postpositions, circumpositions and intransitive adpositions/particles. The second classification, on the other hand, is based on the meaning of the adpositions, which results in distinguishing the following three subclasses: spatial, temporal and...

This section discusses the complementation of adpositional phrases. Sections 2.1-2.3 will show that, in the core case, the complement of an adposition is a noun phrase: adpositional phrases are not common as complements of adpositions, although there is a small set of prepositions that may occur with them; adjectival phrases acting as the complement of an adposition are extremely rare, if possible at all. Section 2.4 will show that complementation by finite and infinitival clauses is readily possible, but normally involves an anticipatory pronominal PP (that is, a PP with an °R-pronoun as its complement); this section will pay special...

Generally speaking, adpositional phrases resist modification with the exception of the spatial and temporal ones. So, whereas the non-spatial/temporal adpositional phrase in (1a) cannot be modified, the spatial and temporal adpositional phrases in (1b&c) can.

(1) a. Vanwege de vakantie is de bibliotheek gesloten.

because. of the vacation is the library closed

‘The library is closed because of the vacation.’

b. (Vlak) voor de deur stond een grote lamp.

just in. front. of the door stood a big lamp

‘A big lamp stood just in front of the table.’

c. (Vlak) voor zijn vakantie moest hij plotseling naar het ziekenhuis....

This section is concerned with the syntactic uses of adpositional phrases shown in Table 1. For all these syntactic uses we will investigate at least the following four syntactic properties: the possibility of °topicalization, °scrambling, °PP-over-V, and °R-extraction.

The use of adpositional phrases in positions that are normally occupied by a nominative or an accusative noun phrase is restricted to constructions in which the adpositional phrase acts as the °logical SUBJECT of a complementive: the two examples in (1) illustrate, respectively, a copular and avinden-construction, in which the locational prepositional phraseonder het bed‘under the bed’ functions as...

This section is devoted to R-pronominalization and R-extraction. The first notion refers to pronominalization of the nominal complement of a preposition by means of a so-called R-word, which must precede the preposition. In (3) we give two examples with the R-worder, which will be glossed astherefor reasons that will become clear when we discuss the examples in (6).

(1) a. Jan kijkt naar de film. a’. Jan kijkt ernaar.

Jan looks at the movie the movie there. at

‘Jan is watching the movie.’ ‘Jan is watching it.’

b. Jan wacht op de bus. b’. Jan wacht erop....