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Boundaries, Phases and Interfaces: Case studies in honor of Violeta Demonte
Edited by Olga Fernández-Soriano, Elena Castroviejo Miró and Isabel Pérez-Jiménez
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 239] 2017
► pp. 325–342

Grammatical categories at the Lexicon-Syntax-Semantics interface

The case of prepositions

| PhD. Universidad Complutense de Madrid | Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
Although it is descriptively useful to classify lexical items into grammatical categories, this classification is not theoretically accurate and it requires a more fine-grained analysis.
This is possible by means of a model like the one presented in this article. In it, each node of a universal syntactic structure encodes an indecomposable semantic component (which can be altered by modifiers). Lexical items lexicalize different chunks of the structure. The category to which they are related and the differences between elements belonging to the same category depend on the chunk they lexicalize.
I show that prepositions, for instance, lexicalize different chunks of the structure around the node Rel(ation) (only Rel, Rel and a modifier or only a modifier of Rel). This explains the different behavior of lexical items included under the label preposition (as can be seen, for instance, in their different possibilities of combination).
Keywords: preposition, syntax-semantics interface, modifier, phrasal spell-out, relation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The model: A syntactico-semantic structure and a postsyntactic lexicalization
  • 3.The lexico-syntactico-semantic structure of prepositions
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.239.15rom
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