Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem • Mini-course • 11–12 January ...

Marcel den Dikken — Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem — Mini-course 2013 — The syntax of adpositional phrases
4
(a)
(b)
(c)
the (in)ability of prePPs to occur in the complement of directional manner-of-motion verbs
(op de heuvel wandelen ‘on the hill walk’ — grammatical on a locative reading for all
speakers; ambiguous between a locative and a directional reading only for some speakers)
the (in)ability of the postP portion of a circumPP to be incorporated into the verbal cluster
%
(dat het water onder het huis is < door>gelopen ‘that the water under the house
is run)
the (in)ability of the prePP portion of a circumPP to be extracted with stranding of the postP
%
portion ( onder welk huis is het water door gelopen? ‘under which house is the water
through run’)
• I will not go through the nitty gritty of the Dutch xPP data in any (further) detail here (referring you
to Koopman’s and Den Dikken’s papers for extensive exemplification and discussion)
I only draw attention to a major problem with Den Dikken’s analysis of circumPPs, based on (9d.iii)
the claim is that circumPP order results from raising CP
[PLACE]
in (9d.iii), which is prepositional, to
SpecCP
[PATH], yielding the ‘P Loc DP P Dir’ order that characterises circumPPs
the problem is that, as (3) shows, in circumPPs are simultaneously modified by both a path modifier
and a place modifier, the two modifiers are adjacent, with the former preceding the latter — (3),
which is the expected word order on Den Dikken’s (2010) analysis of circumPPs, is ungrammatical
[PLACE]
[PATH]
it seems that the landing-site of leftward movement of CP must be lower than SpecCP
(3) *het vliegtuig vloog [ CP(Path) [ CP(Place) tien meter (hoog) boven het strand] [tien meter (lang) langs]]
the airplane flew ten metre high above the beach ten metre long along
Q where is the external argument of a predicative xPP base-generated?
a question not addressed by either Koopman (2010) or Den Dikken (2010)
• the subject of a predicative xPP surfaces, of course, outside the entire xPP
but as is well known, the surface position of a subject is not necessarily its base position: subjects
have a tendency to raise
Q-float is generally a good diagnostic for the position(s) harbouring an empty category linked to the
subject — specifically, a trace; as Baltin notes, PRO behaves differently from raising
(10) a. the children seemed all to have left
b. *the children promised Mary all to leave
c. *all to leave would be difficult for them
• a floating Q associated with the subject of the xPP is possible inside an xPP
(11) (wat de tafel betreft), [er allemaal boven op] liggen de boeken
what the table concerns there all up on lie the books
‘as for the table, the books are all lying up on top of it’
(12) (wat de verdediging betreft), met [de spitsen [er allebei hooguit een halve meter achter]]
what the defence concerns with the forwards there both at.most a half metre behind
ziet de scheidsrechter nooit of het buitenspel is
sees the referee never whether it off.side is
‘as for the defence, with the forwards both at most half a metre behind it, the referee will
never be able to see whether they’re off-side or not’