Complement and Adverbial PPs: Implications for Clause Structure

Abstract

Abstract In what follows I will consider certain aspects of the syntax of prepositional phrases. In particular I will discuss some evidence from my own work and from that of Schweikert (2004) that suggests that PPs, despite appearances, are rigidly ordered among each other, this order being concealed in certain cases by the application of focus sensitive movements.1 Although the order of PPs in postverbal position (typical of VO languages) is in general the mirror image of the order of the same PPs in preverbal position (typical of OV languages), their relative height (and scope) turns out to be the same, a property that I will take to suggest a universal order of merge of the different PP types. If we start by asking what structure postverbal PPs enter in a VO language like English we immediately run into a curious paradox (Pesetsky 1995). Some of their properties would seem to favor the traditional, pre-antisymmetry, analysis of Chomsky (1981), according to which the PPs are right-adjoined to VP (those on the right being higher than and c-commanding those on the left): This is expected under (1), where the object does not c-command the PP (at least under a definition of c-command that makes reference to “first branching node,” as in Reinhart 1983), but not under (2), where the object necessarily c-commands all of the PPs to its right.4