Chistina Tortora
CUNY
Spanish and Italian (and other Romance languages) exhibit minimal pairs of place PPs (to be distinguished from path, or directional, PPs), where one member of the pair can be characterized as "complex," and the other as "simplex." The complex PP, which can be seen in (1a) for Spanish and in (2a) for Italian, involves a lexical preposition in combination with the grammatical preposition /a/. The simplex counterparts ((1b) and (2b)) occur without /a/:
(1) a. Juan se había escondido [ bosque adentro ]. (Spanish)
Juan se had hidden [ forest a.inside ]
b. Juan se había escondido [ dentro del bosque ].
(2) a. Gianni era nascosto [ dietro all'albero ]. (Italian)
Gianni was hidden [ behind a the.tree ]
b. Gianni era nascosto [ dietro l'albero ].
In this talk, I examine a number of different (locative) lexical Ps that can appear in these complex/simplex pairs in both Spanish and Italian, and show that there is a systematic semantic and syntactic difference between the complex type (1a/2a) and the simplex type (1b/2b), which suggests a unified cross-linguistic analysis, despite the fact that Italian seems to differ in certain respects from Spanish. Abstracting away from the differences (also to be discussed, and to be attributed to, among other things, the different nature of the grammatical preposition /a/ in the two languages), the generalization is the following: while the complex PP (1a/2a) denotes a space that is unbounded, the simplex PP (1b/2b) denotes a space that is bounded (or "punctual"). The data and analysis I will discuss support the view that place PPs, like VPs (and NPs), have their own functional structure, which contains an Aspectual Phrase (the head of which encodes the boundedness feature, instantiated by /a/). Beyond the syntactic analogy between locative prepositions and nouns and verbs, we also find a semantic analogy, whereby (non-linear, two- and three-dimensional) space is linguistically conceptualized as either bounded or unbounded, much in the way entities (count vs. mass) and events (delimited vs. undelimited) are.
Reception to follow in 1413 Marie Mount Hall.