prepositions

[nigel vincent]

On the question of the categorial status of adpositions and adverbs can I
recommend Jespersen 'The Philosophy of Grammar' Ch VI (p.87ff in my 1992
Chicago UP reprint?. And of course the idea that prepositions are
transitive adverbs has been a stock-in-trade of generative grammar since
the early 1970's (cf work by Jackendoff, Emonds and Henk van Riemsdijks'
1978 dissertation).

One way to look at the Italian type 'sono andato incontro al professore' is
to say that the adverb/prep 'incontro' subcategorises for a PP, viz in the
example here 'al professore'. When you pronominalise this PP you use a PP
clitic - in the case in point 'gli' 'to him' since 'professore' is masc and
so you get 'gli sono andato incontro', so the generalization would then be
that Italian allows stranding of prepositions that take PP complements but
not those that take NP complements. In that sense there *is* a difference
between the English stranding pattern and this construction in Italian -
which is what Mauro Tosco's native intuition was telling him (despite the
subsequent put-down from Paul Hopper).
(For those who read Italian, there is a discussion of this construction in
Rizzi's contribution to L. Renzi (ed.) 'Grande Grammatica di>Consultazione'.)

Nigel Vincent	               Tel: +44-(0)161-275 3194
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