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Chapter 1 examines which items are functionally equivalent to prepositions, crosslinguistically and at different stages in the history of one language. It then considers the main syntactic forms that prepositions can take.

This chapter constitutes the first elaborate cartographic analysis of the fine structure of PPs based on an in-depth study of Dutch, and provides the background for many of the contributions to this volume. In addition to postulating a PlaceP hosting stative prepositions inside a PathP hosting directional prepositions, the author’s proposal offers evidence for a number of functional projections between the two and above PathP to make room for the movement of er pronouns, degree phrases and other modifiers. The author’s analysis in terms of leftward movements and pied-piping of inner constituents of the extended projection of PPs is the first attempt to offer an account of the complex internal syntax of Dutch (and German) PPs; languages which feature prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions.

This chapter argues for a richly articulated structure where a nominal head (Place) (cf. Terzi’s contribution) is embedded within an extended functional projection, itself embedded under additional functional structure in the presence of directional prepositions. The author compares German (addressing the syntax and morphology of such ‘doubling’ cases as Er sitzt auf dem Tisch drauf ‘he sits on the table there-on’), English and French, discussing in particular the position of the prepositions zu, to, and à within the proposed hierarchy. Prominent in the discussion are also such parameters as pronunciation/nonpronunciation of material merged in specifier or head position in the hierarchy and movement of subconstituents of the hierarchy.

This chapter discusses the axis system lexicalized in the semantics of Finnish postpositions. There are two kinds of postposition in Finnish meaning ‘in front of’ and ‘behind’: these postpositions indicate that both the Figure and the reference object are moving or are neutral with respect to motion. It is also shown that the Finnish prepositions meaning ‘in front of’ and ‘behind’ do not only refer to horizontal spatial relations, but any one-dimensional relation. Those postpositions that mean ‘beside’ refer to two-dimensional relations. However, the postpositions that mean ‘above’ and ‘below’ can only refer to vertical relations. The dimensional system and the orientation of the axes (horizontal, vertical, side-to-side) are dependent on each other and should be described as parts of the same system, at least when it comes to the semantics of Finnish postpositions.

Talmy's (2000) verb-framed/satellite-framed typology is examined from the perspective of parameter theory. The objectives and methods of typology, versus parameter theory, are contrasted. The Compounding Parameter (TCP, Snyder 2001) is argued to play an important role in many constructions typical of satellite-framed languages. Yet, other points of variation interact with TCP, such as whether the language has “incremental” Ps (Gehrke 2008), and whether V is allowed to take a small-clause complement. Washios (1997) distinction between weak and strong resultatives is reinterpreted as a distinction between AP-resultatives and SC-resultatives. A similar distinction is proposed in the domain of motion predicates: In a [+TCP] language that has both SC-complements and incremental Ps, an accomplishment event can be constructed by combining a pure manner-of-motion verb with either an incremental PP (denoting a path), or a locative SC (denoting a result state). Evidence is considered from English, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese.

This chapter discusses the grammaticalization and cyclical development of adpositions in Hungarian and changes within the adpositional phrase (PP). Postpositions often develop in possessive structures and can go through several steps in grammaticalization by losing their nominal features and becoming more functional elements, sometimes losing their spatial meaning by the end of the process. At this point a new cycle of grammaticalization may begin. As a result of grammaticalization a functional projection on the left periphery of the PP developed, the head of this new projection being different from the more lexical postpositional head, in that it is peripheral within the phrase and does not have to follow its complement. The fact that these elements are no longer in a strictly head-final structure results in them moving in the phrase and clause freely, and they can function as (verbal) particles within the clause.

Although Haitian and Saramaccan share a common Gbe substrate, there are differences between them. As was shown in Chapter 3, these discrepancies may be due to differences between their superstrate languages or to different amounts of exposure by the creoles’ creators to their respective superstrate languages. This chapter explores a third potential cause of differences between creoles that share the same substrate languages, demonstrating that creoles’ creators have relabeling options; they may choose different ones, resulting in differences between two creoles. In this chapter, relabeling options are addressed on the basis of the following differences between Saramaccan and Haitian: Saramaccan has postpositions and morphological reduplication, like its substrate languages, but Haitian does not. The content of this chapter is a reply to Norval Smith’s “Voodoo Chile” (2001).

Mẽbengokre exhibits a causative construction that is constructed as an applicative, introducing a low argument without displacing the external argument from its subject function. In the typical case, this causative could be seen as an instance of the so-called sociative causative, whereby the causee is accompanied in the action by the causer, rather than being simply induced to action by the causer. These causatives can be straightforwardly analysed as comitative applicatives. However, Mẽbengokre displays the peculiarity that causatives of most verbs that involve a change of state decidedly do not get a sociative interpretation. This chapter addresses the puzzle of how a true causative semantics can arise in such cases, claiming that the applicative morpheme in these causatives has a grammatical use not unlike that of subject-reintroducing ‘by’ in English passives, and that this grammatical function is tied with a null causative morpheme that attaches only to certain verbal stems.

This chapter outlines the etymologies that have been proposed for the seven simple postpositions of Hindi. The historical attestations of these postpositions form the empirical backbone of this book, so that their etymological reconstruction is essential for assembling the data corpus. Whereas some of the postpositions can be traced as far as Old Indic with certainty (Hindi mẽ ‘in’ and par ‘on’), others do not have an uncontroversial etymological reconstruction, such as Hindi ko (DAT/ACC) or se (INS/ABL). Even though the historical phonology of Indo-Aryan has been researched in detail, high frequency elements such as adpositions do not abide by the general phonological changes, which is a challenge for reconstruction. Therefore, it is pointed out what can be relied on and what is more speculative, which will be referred back to in subsequent chapters.

Chapter 4 discusses the major prior proposal that has been put forward regarding the origin of postpositions in Indo-Aryan. It has been argued by several authors, both specialists and non-specialists of Indo-Aryan, that the postpositions continue the old category of Proto Indo-European local particles. However, while this scenario accounts adequately for the origins of adpositions in other branches of Indo-European, this chapter shows that it must be rejected for Indo-Aryan. Instead, the postpositions grammaticalize from a variety of nominal, verbal, and adverbial forms and thus present entirely novel formations. In order to account for this divergence of Indo-Aryan from the rest of the language family, I propose a mismatch between semantic and prosodic structure in the usage of local particles in early Old Indic, which lead to their early loss in functions foreshadowing adpositional usage.

This chapter proposes an account for the grammaticalization of Hungarian postpositions. Based on Old Hungarian data, it is argued that the change from nouns to postpositions goes via an intermediate stage, which corresponds to an intermediate syntactic category and position, AxialPart. In Old Hungarian, some Postpositional Phrases (PPs) exhibit a syntactic variation analogous to possessive constructions, which suggests that those postpositional elements still have some nominal features and that they are not fully grammaticalized Ps yet. Those elements that do not show possessive variation and those that are suffixal are P heads, that is, they are generated either in a Place head or in a Path head within the PP.