On the Types of Prepositions and Their Projections in Syntax

A preposition in general expresses a relation between two entities and characteristically selects an NP. This paper supports the view that there is no independent evidence for moving this requirement of an NP as its complement. Instead, adopting the idea of Jackendoff (1973) and Emonds (1982) among others, we claim English prepositions show various complementation patterns like verbs. The paper discusses that prepositions, in parallel with verbs, select various kinds of complements, and this information is encoded in the lexicon. We show that there are at least three types of prepositions in terms of their subcategorization information. The lexicon, a rich repository of idiosyncratic information not predicted from syntactic operations, is best in capturing these lexical properties. The idiosyncratic restrictions relating to the possible range of complements that a preposition select are directly analogous to those in the case of verbs. The paper claim that such lexical restrictions can be best treated in terms of properties of individual lexical items rather than by phrase structure rules. This system can provide a straightforward analysis of related phenomena such as movement paradox examples as well as extraction out of a PP constituent.