Cristina Real: Simple and Complex locative prepositions in Catalan: a comparative view

Seminari del CLT

Simple and Complex locative prepositions in Catalan: a comparative view
CRISTINA REAL (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Divendres, 28 de setembre de 2018

In this talk I propose a minimalist analysis of simple and complex locative prepositions in Catalan, from a comparative perspective. Specifically, I claim that semantic and syntactic properties that are normally considered part of the field of the extended projection of PPs in cartographic approaches (categories like Place, Degree, K, and AxPart, for example) are properties of the DP. This claim assumes the view that adpositions are a functional projection that relates two DPs, the Figure and the Ground, and not a lexical head that projects a functional domain as Ns, Vs or As (cf. den Dikken 2010, Koopman 2000, 2010). The second part of the paper proposes a model to account for the variation that locative prepositions exhibit across Romance languages following the Borer Conjecture. More precisely, microparametric differences in adpositions depend on the particular composition of features in p.