Preposition doubling

[Robert Beard]

If you are interested in knowing why preposition doubling occurs, you might find
some clues in chapters 10-12 of "Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology" by an obscure
morphologist with an unusual if not unfortunate background in Slavic philology.
I think SUNY publishes it at a very reasonable price but copies have been
reported sporadically in well-stocked libraries.

The claim is that prepositions are a type of free variants  in a class with case
endings which do not form a lexical category at all!  Moreover, they are simply
grammatical morphemes in a class with case endings, hence subject to the
grammatically insignificant redundancy which characterizes all morphological
objects and processes.  The brutal evidence for this position also clarifies the
rarity of P-stranding, the absence of Ps in derivation and compounding, the fact
that Ps form a closed class, as well as their ubiquitous 'transposition' with
conjunctions, adverbs and adjectives, and many other of those systematically
ignored properties of 'P' which demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that it
cannot be a bird of the same feature as Ns, Vs, and As.

--RB

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Robert Beard, Director                               rbeard at bucknell.edu
Russian & Linguistics Programs                              717-524-1336
Bucknell University http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rbeard/diction.html
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