Aspect inside PLACE PPs
2008; John Benjamins Publishing Company; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1075/la.120.14tor
ISSN0166-0829
Autores Tópico(s)Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization
ResumoSpanish and Italian (and other Romance languages) exhibit minimal pairs of place PPs (to be distinguished from path, or directional, PPs), where one member of the pair can be characterized as “complex,” and the other as “simplex.” The complex PP involves a lexical preposition in combination with the grammatical preposition a (e.g., Italian: dietro all’albero ‘behind a the tree’), while the simplex counterpart occurs without a (e.g., Italian: dietro l’albero ‘behind the tree’). This paper examines a number of different (locative) lexical Ps that can appear in these complex/simplex pairs in both Spanish and Italian, and shows that there is a systematic semantic and syntactic difference between the complex type and the simplex type, which suggests a unified cross-linguistic analysis, despite the fact that Italian seems to differ in certain respects from Spanish. Abstracting away from the differences (which are attributed to, among other things, the different nature of the grammatical preposition a in the two languages), the generalization is the following: while the complex PP denotes a space that is unbounded, the simplex PP denotes a space that is bounded (or ‘punctual’). The data and analysis support the view that place PPs, like VPs (and NPs), have their own functional structure, which contains an Aspectual Phrase (the head of which encodes the boundedness feature, instantiated by a when the feature has no value). Beyond the syntactic analogy between locative prepositions and nouns and verbs, we also find a semantic analogy, whereby (non-linear, twoand three-dimensional) space is linguistically conceptualized as either bounded or unbounded, much in the way entities (count vs. mass) and events (delimited vs. undelimited) are.
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