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On Prepositions and Case-Marking in French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Laurie Zaring
Laurie Zaring*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

One proposal which has played and continues to play an important role in the syntactic analysis of Romance prepositional phrases is that not everything which looks like a preposition is in fact a true preposition. First proposed by Vergnaud (1974) for French, the idea is that some apparent Ps actually act as simple Case-marking on an NP; in Vergnaud’s case, this was the à associated with Goal arguments. As a result, the syntactic representation of Goal arguments involves no PP-node, but rather an NP with an inflectional Case-marking à. Vergnaud’s proposal was developed further for French à by Kayne (1975) and Jaeggli (1981), and is assumed to be valid for French de by Elliott (1986). Chomsky (1986) also suggests that English of is in many cases the realization of genitive Case, and Demonte (1989) argues that many instances of Spanish a or de phrases selected for by verbs are not PPs but rather NPs marked with Case.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 363 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1991

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