prepositional adjuncts

[Colin Matheson]

> If semantically vacous prepositions are (marked) NPs they
> should be linearized as NPs but they aren't. Of course one could
> distinguish between marked and unmarked NPs but then one had three
> classes instead of two.

That always seems to me me to be an odd way to argue about linguistics
- it may be formally more parsimonious, but to me there's plenty of
evidence that `real' grammars make dozens of low-level distinctions
like this.

I analysed "of" in English partitives as a marker in my PhD thesis and
in fact treated the definite article the same way.  You do
subsequently need to make slightly different assumptions about the
distribution of marked and unmarked NPs, but that seems absolutely
fine to me, and *much* nicer than a class of PP into which loads of
strange bedfellows are shoehorned (is that enough mixed metaphors? :)

Colin