What is it about?
The article argues that not all adpositions are the head of an adpositional phrase (a PP). In some of their uses, some of the more commonly used adpositions are adjoined to nominal or verbal projections. This is demonstrated for the Dutch adpositions 'te', 'van', 'voor' and 'om'. Such adpositions are called 'minor'. Independent evidence for the existence of minor adpositions is provided by the fact that there are also minor pronouns an determiners in Dutch.
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Why is it important?
The demonstration that certain words cannot be the head of a phrasal projection provides evidence against the transformational assumption that all morphemes, including phonologically empty ones, can head a phrasal (functional) projection.
Perspectives
It was an unexpected discovery that the distinction between major and minor words which I had already applied to the Dutch pronouns, is also relevant for the prepositions.
Frank Van Eynde
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Minor Adpositions in Dutch, The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics, January 2004, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1023/b:jcom.0000003545.77976.64.
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