The Ban on Preposition Stranding in Old English

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Note the contrast between the PDE structures below: (i) is an interrogative sentence, whereas (ii) illustrates a passive configuration. (i.) Whose mother did John shout angrily at? (ii.) *Beth's mother was shouted angrily at As is well‐known, OE adjectives, in a similar fashion to verbs, can assign (inherent) dative or genitive Case. The inherent accusative Case assigned or checked by prepositions is not distinguished morphologically speaking from the structural accusative Case checked by verbs, it being precisely the inability of the prepositional object to be extracted from P that characterises the former. Prepositions very rarely assign or check genitive Case. In this very case, the preposition assigns inherent accusative to a relative pronoun in the complementiser position. See, however, section 3.2 below for another name for the same projection. Additionally, the verb is an impersonal one taking a dative DP. In frameworks like those of Bobaljik () or Koizumi (), such a functional projection bears the name of AgrOP, which is reminiscent of the phrase occurring in between TP and VP previous to the advent of the vP‐shell mechanism.