My Talk at MorSynVarAd
In a week, I'll be giving a talk at the Morphosyntactic Variation in Adpositions Workshop at Queen's College, Cambridge.
My paper is about Afrikaans circumpositions, which are (i) always spatial, and (ii) always directional. Afrikaans forms circumpositions in which the two adpositions are non-identical, but also ones in which the adpositions are identical (=doubling). But Afrikaans also has a simpler way of forming directional expressions, namely as prepositional phrases. One problem we have to solve is why the same language would allow such variability in how it forms directional spatial expressions, and what the underlying structure(s) of these expressions is/are.
I argue that, in general, we can understand the properties of circumpositional phrases in Afrikaans by considering the macro-category P as a syntactic zone rather than a primitive (cartographic-style analysis), and that the divergent properties of directional adpositional phrases in languages like Afrikaans fall out from how the (same) lexical material maps onto the (varying) underlying structure.
So the more specific claim in this talk is that circumpositions (both the doubling and the non-doubling kind) have a different underlying structure from the directional prepositional phrases in the language. If you're interested in the motivations for this claim, then please download the handout!
The handout for my talk is available here.
<edit: and here is an action shot:>
