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Part of
Romance Linguistics 2013: Selected papers from the 43rd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), New York, 17-19 April, 2013
Edited by Christina Tortora, Marcel den Dikken, Ignacio L. Montoya and Teresa O'Neill
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 9] 2016
► pp. 379–397

From N to particle

Prepositionless home in the dialects of Northern Italy

| University of Padua

The paper addresses the distribution of preposition-drop with the noun casa ‘home’ in the spatial adpositions of some Northern Italian varieties. It is shown that in these varieties P-less home behaves syntactically as a locative adverb, which under specific circumstances, becomes a particle. It is suggested that P-less home is not a special noun but a proper member of the category P generated in a specific projection in the fine-grained PP (Cinque 2010), hosting viewpoint modifiers of the silent head PLACE. The adverb vs. particle nature of P-less home derives from motivated movements inside and outside the PP triggered by a directional context. The same analysis is extended to Modern (and Old) English home.

Published online: 3 February 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.9.20ros
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