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

168 Bettelou Los
c. Bill pushed Harry along (= along the trail)
(Goldberg & Jackendoff 2004: 543)
d. Wait Long by the River and the Bodies of Your Enemies Will Float By
(= by one’s position; title of CD album by The Drones)
This phenomenon could be interpreted as loss of argument structure, on a par
with the loss of argument structure we observe in the grammaticalization of verbs
into auxiliaries. There is, however, a caveat here in that prepositions may not have
a syntactic argument at an earlier stage but were located in the specifier of an NP in
the local cases (instrumental, ablative, locative). They developed into prepositions
only later (Vincent 1999):
(23) KP
Spec K'
K NP
Spec
adposition
N
N'
Particles may well have split off from prepositions when the latter were still in
the ‘adposition’ stage, and may never have had proper syntactic arguments – they
were associated with a particular NP by virtue of occupying its specifier position.
Particles like down, out, off and up may have acquired their prepositional use only
recently: down is originally a PP that grammaticalized to a head, while OE ut and
up do not show clear prepositional uses but are usually followed by prepositional
phrases. 6 What is clear is that the defocusing of the object allows the particle to be
analysed as a Head rather than a Phrase, a typical grammaticalization effect.
Because the syntactic status of some of these NP complements of path-Ps is
unclear, I will refer to this NP as the ground, a semantic rather than syntactic term,
and to the object NP of the particle verb combination as the figure, following Svenonius
(2003), after Talmy (1978). In a sentence like he took the ring off his finger,
then, the ring is the figure and his finger is the ground of the particle off.
(25) he took the ring off his finger
figure prt ground
(24) PP
Spec P'
P
preposition
NP
Spec N'
6. Eg. in examples like Hi eodon up to þære dune (Num. 14: 40), He eode ut on ðæt land (Gen.
24, 63). Ut and up in such phrases are either adverbs in the spec of a PP or heads themselves
postmodified or complemented by a PP. See Elenbaas (2007) for a discussion.
N