prepositional adjuncts

[Jesse Tseng]

I wrote:
>> The syntactic analysis for all PPs ought to be quite
>> uniform.

Frank Van Eynde wrote: "Why?"

To clarify: I was focusing on the issue of PPs headed by vacuous
Ps vs. those headed by contentful Ps, and saying that this
distinction should not be reflected in the syntactic
representation, in particular not by assigning a head-marker
structure to the former and a head-complement analysis to the
latter.

I agree with Frank, however, that among the set of PPs we can
find some syntactically exceptional constructions where the P
should not be treated as the syntactic head.  For English, I'm
thinking of examples like "at war", "on sale", "in the know".
In these cases I still wouldn't go for a marker analysis (or a
minor preposition analysis) because the NP doesn't seem to be
the syntactic head either.  Instead, I would say these are
non-headed constructions, and I am tempted to approach some of
Frank's Dutch examples the same way.  For some of the others
(e.g. infinitival "te"), I would consider an affix treatment.

Jesse