Peter Svenonius

Moving Right Along was an ‘Outstanding Young Researcher’ project funded by the Norwegian Research Council and led by Professor Peter Svenonius (more project information)

The project succeeded in documenting a portion of the wide range of variation in expressions of spatial concepts cross-linguistically, and in developing theories of several aspects of this variation.

A lexical semantic theory of the argument structure of adpositions.
Svenonius, Peter. 2007. 'Adpositions, Particles, and the Arguments they Introduce' in Argument Structure, ed. by Eric Reuland, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, and Giorgos Spathas, pp. 63-103. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Roy, Isabelle and Peter Svenonius. 2009. Complex prepositions. In Autour de la préposition. Actes du Colloque International de Caen (20-22 septembre 2007), edited by Jacques François, Eric Gilbert, Claude Guimier, and Maxi Krause, pp. 105-116. Presses Universitaires de Caen, Caen.
Svenonius, Peter. 2008. Review of Non-projecting Words by Ida Toivonen Language 84 3: 666-670.
Svenonius, Peter. 2008. Russian prefixes are phrasal. In Formal Description of Slavic Languages: The Fifth Conference, Leipzig 2003, edited by Gerhild Zybatow, Luka Szucsich, Uwe Junghanns, and Roland Meyer, pp. 526-537. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main.


A cartographic theory of spatial prepositional phrases.
Svenonius, Peter. 2010 'Spatial P in English', in Cartography of Syntactic Structures, ed. by G. Cinque and L. Rizzi, Oxford University Press.
Svenonius, Peter. 2008, Projections of P, in Syntax and Semantics of Spatial P, ed by Anna Asbury, Jakub Dotlacil, Berit Gehrke, and Rick Nouwen, pp. 63-84. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Pantcheva, Marina. 2008. The place of PLACE in Persian. In Syntax and Semantics of Spatial P, edited by Anna Asbury, Jakub Dotlačil, Berit Gehrke, and Rick Nouwen, pp. 305-330. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
Antonio Fábregas: '(Axial) Parts and Wholes'
Johan Rooryck and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd: 'The Syntax of Spatial Anaphora'
R. Amritavalli: 'Parts, Axial Parts, and Next Parts in Kannada'



A parametric theory of directed motion constructions.
Son, Minjeong, and Peter Svenonius. 2008, Microparameters of Cross-linguistic variation: Directed motion and Resultatives, in the Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. by Natasha Abner and Jason Bishop, pp. 388-396. Cascadilla Press, Somerville, Ma.
Son, Minjeong. 2007. 'Directionality and Resultativity: The Cross-linguistic Correlation Revisited'
Son, Minjeong. 2006. Directed Motion and Non-Predicative PathP in Korean


A nanosyntactic theory of path expressions.
Pantcheva, Marina. 2011. Decomposing Path: The Nanosyntax of Directional Expressions. PhD thesis, University of Tromsø.