Location and locality

We examine spatial semantics, take notions such as location and change of location to be basic, and address the question of whether these notions are reflected in syntax and morphology. We state that there are indeed languages in which there is a direct grammatical correlate of location and path. Accordingly, we take the abstract structure of a spatial phrase in the verbal domain to be [V’ Vo [PP DIRo [P’ LOCo [N’ No ]]]]. The goal of this paper is to present new evidence for such a structure based on locality considerations. A robust notion of locality (heads involved in a syntactic relation R must be hierarchically adjacent) provides the following predictions: vR(V,PDIR), vR(PDIR,PLOC), vR(PLOC,N), *R(V,PLOC), *R(PDIR,N), *R(V,N).

Published online: 21 February 2007
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.101.17rie