prepositional adjuncts

[Van Eynde]

At 17.29 29/03/01 +0200, Jesse Tseng wrote:
>Like Stefan, I stick with the head analysis instead of a marker
>approach in my thesis.  Broadly speaking, semantically vacuous
>Ps and other Ps have the same syntactic properties, and the PPs
>they project show the same syntactic behavior.  So I see no
>motivation for grouping prepositions into two different
>syntactic categories or making some of them heads and others
>non-heads.  The syntactic analysis for all PPs ought to be quite
>uniform.

Why?
I agree that in languages like German, Dutch and English the
vast majority of Ps are heads of PPs, but I also think that one should
keep an open mind about this issue. In some work I have recently done
on Dutch prepositions I have identified 5 types of combination in which
a head treatment of the preposition is demonstrably inadequate: they
concern the infinitival 'te', the complementizer use of 'om', the
'aan' of the periphrastic progressive, the 'voor' in 'wat zijn dat
voor mensen' and the use of 'van' in 'er staan van die grote dozen op
tafel'. I am sure that more can be found, also in other languages.

To put the matter in a broader perspective. Languages like German, Dutch and
English have Ps which are heads of PPs (of course), but they also have Ps
which
are incorporated and which have lost their syntactic autonomy
(EN to-day, DE zu-rueck, NL te-rug); notice that there are hundreds of such
words with incorporated prepositions; so, this is not a marginal phenomenon.
Now, in between these two, there are prepositions which
---at least in some of their uses---have retained their syntactic autonomy,
but not their syntactic head status. To distinguish incorporated Ps from
syntactically autonomous ones, one can employ the Pullum-Zwicky criteria,
to distinguish Ps with syntactic head status from the ones without one can use
the criteria I have proposed in 'on the notion 'minor preposition''.

Frank