prepositional adjuncts

[Ulrich Koch]

Mike Maxwell wrote:

> I don't know enough about German to know whether this is relevant, but in
> English there is a strong distinction (pre-theoretically) between the
> situation where a verb takes a PP complement, and the situation where a verb
> takes a particle (i.e. a bare preposition) plus an NP.  "Look up" is a
> typical stereotypical minimal pair ("look up the answer"/ "look up the
> chimney").

In German these distinction is even stronger, because the "particle"
is a part of the verb in the infinitive and participle forms.  That's
why it's referred to as a separable verb prefix.  It's not a
preposition.

> While English doesn't have the overt case distinction, one might
> imagine that there could be such a distinction in languages with "real" case
> morphology.  ("Real case morphology" is like "real grammars", I guess :-).)
> In other words, the particle + NP construction might show one case (or the
> case might depend on the verb), while the PP construction might show a
> different case.

Exactly.  Examples from German:

(1) Ich schlage die     Antwort nach. (separable verb prefix)
    I   look    the-ACC answer  up
(2) Ich schlage nach der     Fliege.  (preposition)
    I   hit     at   the-DAT fly

((2) means that I try to hit the fly, but don't necessarily succeed.)
In (1), the case depends on the verb.  Notice also that the word order
is different.

Greetings,
Ulli
--
Ulrich Koch, comp. science and comp. ling. student