The Categorial Status of Body Part Prepositions in Valley Zapotec ...

2.4 Evidence from Categorial Selection
Another piece of syntactic evidence that the BP locatives are prepositions comes
from categorial selection (c-selection) of verbs. The ability of verbs to require the
complement they select to be of a certain grammatical category is referred to as c-
selection. A particular issue with BP prepositional phrases in VZ languages is that they
are always phonetically ambiguous with potential possessed nouns, since the object of the
preposition follow the preposition and the possessor of the body part follows it, as shown
in Table 8.
Table 8. PP and NP Analysis of ni'ih me'es
ni'ih me'es
under table 'under the table'
PP: P NP
ni'ih me'es
foot table 'the table's foot'
NP: NP NP
possessed possessor
Consider (7a), below, where the verb zùub 'sit' c-selects a complement, which
I've enclosed in brackets. What is the syntactic category of this phrase? An argument
following MacLaury's (1989) assumptions about the status of BP locatives, one could
claim that the entire phrase is a noun phrase, analyzed as 'the table's foot'.
However, if this category is nominal, then this verb ought to be able to c-select
other NPs as complements, but as shown in (7b) this is not possible. Perhaps the verb has
some way to specify that its complement must be a possessed noun. Although this seems
unlikely, it is also easy to show that this type of selection also won't work, because then
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