Prepositions and Verbal Prefixes: The Case of Slavic
Petr Biskup
December 2018 

This monograph is concerned with prepositional elements in Slavic languages, prepositions, verbal prefixes and functional elements of prepositional nature. It argues that verbal prefixes are incorporated prepositions projecting its argument structure in the complement position of the verbal root. The meaning of prefixes is based on the two-argument meaning of prepositions, which is enriched with the CAUSE operator, which conjoins the state denoted by the prepositional phrase and the event expressed by the verbal root. This accounts for various effects of prefixation. The book investigates idiomaticity in the realm of prefixed verbs and proposes a novel analysis of non-compositional prefixed verbs. The non-compositional interpretation arises inter alia because of the fact that either the meaning of the verbal part or the meaning of the prepositional part is shifted by means of Nunberg’s (1995) predicate transfer in the course of the derivation. This study also offers a uniform analysis of cases: prepositional as well as non-prepositional cases are treated as a reflection of the operation Agree between Tense-features and phi-features. It presents a new model of prepositional case assignment, in which the type of prepositional case is determined by semantic properties of particular heads of the decomposed preposition. Furthermore, it investigates prepositional movement from diachronic perspective. It is shown that prepositions can be grammaticalised as a functional element of the higher clausal structure.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003914 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Habilitation, University of Leipzig
keywords:	case, preposition, aspect, prefix, idiomatic reading, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [July 2018] v1 [March 2018]
Downloaded:	2322 times

 

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