Peter Svenonius
P (Preposition, Postposition, Particle):
Anatomy of a Category
E-mail: Peter.Svenonius@hum.uit.no
The universality of categories like N(oun) and V(erb) has been much discussed; Baker (2003) has mounted an extended argument that they are in fact universal—that all natural languages have nouns and verbs. Much less attention has been paid to the category P in a cross-linguistic context, though there are many studies of P in individual languages. In this course I examine the nature of the category P in several different languages and then turn to the question of whether it is universal.
Monday:
The category P in English. Diagnostics to distinguish P from A (Emonds 1985) and from V (Huddleston and Pullum 2002). The extended projection of P (Jackendoff 1972; 1977, den Dikken 1995, Svenonius 2004c).
Tuesday:
The category P in other European
languages: Dutch (van Riemsdijk 1978; 1990, Koopman 2000, den Dikken 2003),
French (Starke 1993), Russian (Yadroff 1999, Yadroff and Franks 2001),
Scandinavian.
Wednesday:
The category P in languages less like English; distinguishing P from V in Chinese (Chao 1968, Li and Thompson 1974; 1981), distinguishing P from N in Northern Saami (Nickel 1990), other languages (Svenonius 2004a).
Thursday:
Expressions of space and directed motion without prepositions; preverbs (Warlpiri), prefixes (Russian, Svenonius 2004b), case (Lezgian, Haspelmath 1993), and other grammatical devices.
The question of whether any or all of these are underlyingly the same thing as what surfaces as P in other languages (van Riemsdijk and Huybregts 2002, Svenonius 2004a).
Friday:
Conclusions: What is it that is universal, in the systems considered here? What would it mean for the category P to be universal, or to not be universal? Can the universal aspects of the expression of spatial concepts or of nominal licensing be connected to non-linguistic cognitive properties, or to independently motivated linguistic properties (Landau and Jackendoff 1993)?
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Ren. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. University of California Press,
Berkeley, Ca.
den Dikken,
Marcel. 1995. Particles: On the Syntax of Verb-particle, Triadic, and Causative
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Marcel. 2003. On the syntax of locative and directional adpositional phrases.
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E. 1985. A Unified Theory of Syntactic Categories. No. 19 in Studies in
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Martin. 1993. A Grammar of Lezgian. No. 9 in Mouton Grammar Library. Mouton de
Gruyter, Berlin.
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Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English
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Ray. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar . No. 2 in Current
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Ray. 1977. X Syntax: A Study of Phrase Structure. No. 2 in Linguistic Inquiry
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Hilda. 2000. Prepositions, postpositions, circumpositions, and particles. In
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Barbara and Ray Jackendoff. 1993. “what” and “where” in spatial language and
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and Sandra A. Thompson. 1974. Co-verbs in Mandarin Chinese: Verbs or
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Peter. 1990. Samisk Grammatikk. Universitetsforlaget, Oslo.
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Henk. 1978. A Case Study in Syntactic Markedness: The Binding Nature of
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Meertens Instituut, Amsterdam.
Starke,
Michal. 1993. Notes on prepositions and clause-structure. Memoire de Diplˆome,
University of Geneva.
Svenonius,
Peter. 2004a. Adpositions, particles, and the arguments they introduce. Ms.
University of Tromsø; to appear in a volume on Argument Structure (John
Benjamins); available at http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000042.
Svenonius,
Peter. 2004b. Slavic prefixes inside and outside VP. In Nordlyd 32.2: Special
issue on Slavic prefixes, edited by Peter Svenonius, pp. 205–253. University of
Tromsø, Tromsø. Available at www.ub.uit.no/munin/nordlyd/.
Svenonius,
Peter. 2004c. Spatial prepositions in English. Ms. University of Tromsø;
available at http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000001.
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Michael. 1999. Formal Properties of Functional Categories: The Minimalist
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