Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

160 Bettelou Los
prepositions (by, in, off, on, over, through, to, under, up) so they are probably prepositional
in origin, but have lost their NP complement. A popular synchronic view
is to label particles ‘intransitive prepositions’ (Emonds 1976) or to say that their
NP-complement has become ‘defocused’ and remains implicit for that reason
(McIntyre 2004), or to talk about ‘reduced prepositional phrases’ (Lipka 1972: 17);
examples are (6a–d), from Lipka (1972: 17):
(6) a. He put the kettle on [the fire]
b. He took the ring off [his finger]
c. He ran up [the stairs]
d. She took the book out [of the pocket]
Some of these items are possibly more adverbial than prepositional (especially
out), and this has been remarked on many times in the literature (e.g., Sroka
1972 who distinguishes ‘adverbs’, ‘prepositions’ and ‘adverb-prepositions’). Fraser
(1965) & Fairclough (1965) use ‘particle’ precisely because it is difficult to draw a
clear line (see also Lipka 1972: 19). The problem of classification in a way reflects
the status of the preposition, or broader, the adposition, as a syntactic category. Is
it a lexical or functional category, is it analogous with V? V and P can both assign
case, whereas N and A cannot; and classifications like intransitive/transitive can
be argued to apply not only to V but also to P. Prepositions are said to express case
realisations (Emonds 1985) and as such to appear in the extended projection of
N rather than in a projection of their own. Adpositions and morphological case
would then be expressions of the same functional category. 2
A third group seems definitely adverbial in origin, but even here we find a trace
of a preposition: forth, forward, out; possibly also home (= homeward). Finally, past
and round are in origin a past participle and an adjective, respectively. If particles
originate in a syntactic construction as complex predicates, this explains why they
are mainly of the categories P and A: 3 they are in origin predicates (PP and AP are
typically predicate categories) but have grammaticalized (after having lexicalized, in
the case of some PPs) into particles and prefixes.
2.2 Can particles be analysed as predicates?
The examples in (7) list some PDE instances of complex predicates collected by
Rappaport Hovav & Levin (2001).
(7) a. Last night, the dog poked me [ PRED awake] every hour to go outside
(The Toronto Sun, 27 Nov. 1994, p. 6)
2. See also Asbury (2005) for a discussion of Hungarian, where the often-assumed dichotomy of
adpositions-are-free and case-suffixes-are-bound is not as clearcut as in many other languages.
. P(articiples) are a special case of A(djectives).