prepositional adjuncts

[Martin Jansche]

On Thu, 29 Mar 2001, Colin Matheson wrote:

> > 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.

What are `real' grammars?
Thanks,

- martin