Cross-linguistic variation in the inventory, content, and distribution of adpositions: How much is there really? Is “P” a universal category? If so, what are its properties?

Svenonius, Peter. In press. Adpositions, Particles, and the Arguments they Introduce. In Argument Structure, edited by Eric Reuland, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, and Giorgos Spathas, 71-110. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. Pre-publication draft available at LingBuzz (click on paper title)

Content and compositionality in P systems: Figure versus Ground, Path versus Place, other conceptual primitives (if that's what they are) and how they are expressed

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Figure and Ground in Language. Chapter 5 in Leonard Talmy, Toward a Cognitive Semantics, vol. I, pp. 311-344. MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma. (Revised version of Talmy 1978 "Figure and Ground in complex sentences")

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Lexicalization patterns. Chapter 1 in Leonard Talmy, Toward a Cognitive Semantics, vol. II, pp. 21-146. MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma. (Revised version of Talmy 1985 "Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms")

van Riemsdijk, Henk, and Riny Huybregts. 2002. Location and Locality. In Progress in Grammar, ed. by Marc van Oostendorp and Elena Anagnostopoulou, 1-23. Meertens Institute, Amsterdam.

The Emergence of Axial Parts: Many languages make use of relational words to express spatial notions, with meanings like ‘top,’ ‘front,’ ‘back,’ and ‘side.’ How are these related to P?

Svenonius, Peter. 2006. The Emergence of Axial Parts. Nordlyd: Tromsø Working Papers in Language and Linguistics 33.1:49-77.

Other papers in Nordlyd: Tromsø Working Papers in Language and Linguistics 33.1, Special Issue on Adpositions, edited by Peter Svenonius and Marina Pantcheva.

Spatial P in English: A detailed investigation into one language, with special reference to ‘particles’ like up, down, in, out, on, off

Svenonius, Peter. To appear. Spatial P in English. In Cartography of Linguistic Structures, vol. 6, edited by Guglielmo Cinque and Luigi Rizzi. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Available from LingBuzz (click on paper title).

The interpretation of Path: Path is a higher-order notion, based on Place. Natural language expressions of Path place the Path morpheme outside the Place morpheme, as if Path dominates Place hierarchically in a structural representatation. This could be the beginning of a theory of the functional sequence

Zwarts, Joost. 2005. Prepositional aspect and the algebra of paths. Linguistics and Philosophy 28:739-779.

Fong, Vivienne. 1997. The Order of Things: What Directional Locatives Denote. PhD dissertation, Stanford University.

Talmy’s Generalization: Some languages express path notions together with the verb, while others express path notions in ‘satellites’ of the verb.

Folli, Raffaella, and Gillian Ramchand. 2005. Prepositions and Results in Italian and English: An analysis from Event decomposition. In Perspectives on Aspect, ed. by Henk J. Verkuyl, Henriette de Swart, and Angeliek van Hout, pp. 81-105. Springer, Dordrecht.

Folli, Raffaella, and Heidi Harley. 2006. On the licensing of causatives of directed motion: Waltzing Matilda all over. Studia Linguistica 60.2:121-155. (you must be on campus or subscribe to SL to use the link)

Son, Minjeong. 2006. Directed Motion and Non-Predicative Path P. Nordlyd: Tromsø Working Papers in Language and Linguistics 33.2: 176-199 (Special issue on Adpositions edited by Peter Svenonius)