Grammaticalization of Complex Prepositions: With reference to in front of and in back of

This paper illustrates grammaticalization of complex prepositions denoting horizontal axis such as in front of and in back of. These complex prepositions tend to evolve from nominal sources in genitive constructions, as shown schematically by [in-the.front-of NP]>>[in front of NP] and [in-the.back-of NP]>>[in back of NP]. The development of the complex prepositional phrases has undergone gradual development of grammaticalization, i.e. a process of reanalysis, in which the four-word construction are reduced into the three-word constructions. The emergence of the complex prepositions is also through analogy which is recognized as a significant mechanism for morphosyntactic and phonological change (Hopper & Traugott 2003[1993], Meillet 1958[1912]). In addition, this paper focuses on the semantic evolution on the basis of semantic designations of the spatial relations provided in Oxford English Dictionary (end ed. 1991). The semantic features seem to contribute to grammaticalization of multi-word syntactic constructions into more syntagmatically compact complex prepositions. To explain such semantic changes of the complex prepositions from nominal sources, three major mechanisms are invoked here, i.e. metaphor, metonymy, and subjectification. Final discussion of this paper is to describe correlation between frequency and semantic specialization of these prepositions by corpus-based observations. This study also addresses the issue from the contrast of the complex prepositions (i.e. in front of and in back of) and the syntactic constructions (i.e. in the front of and in the back of), in which the former takes the entity denoted by the noun phrases as the reference point, whereas the latter takes the entity as the bounded location and thus the reference by the relational nouns front and back are located within the referenced entity.