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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 28, Lisbon
Edited by Ernestina Carrilho, Alexandra Fiéis, Maria Lobo and Sandra Pereira
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10] 2016
► pp. 121–138

Case in Italian complex PPs

| Università Ca'Foscari Venezia
| Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

This paper discusses complex Italian prepositional structures (PPs) involving a lexical P followed by a functional P, in particular a ‘to, at’ and di ‘of’, as in sopra (a) un tavolo “on (to) a table”, and analyzes them in a split-PP framework. Di and a in complex PPs may alternate between them or be obligatory, optional or forbidden according to various factors. By investigating the distributional properties of these Ps w.r.t. the type of lexical P they follow, the syntactic category of their complement, and the predicate sub-categorization, we argue that they are case-markers and that the variation affecting their omission or selection is syntactically-driven. The subtle semantic differentiations pointed out in the literature are claimed to be a by-product of different underlying structures.

Keywords: axial parts, Case, Italian, lexical/functional divide, PLACE, prepositional phrases, split PP
Published online: 8 December 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.10.07gar
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