Motivating a fine-grained syntax of Arabic prepositional phrases

Abstract

The paper provides a novel motivation in favor of a complex and fine-grained syntax of spatial PPs in Arabic. It neatly fills a gap between the complex semantics of spatial expressions and their morphosyntax, which remains unexplained using wide spread cognitive approaches. We propose a fine-grained architecture of root nodes, categories, and features in the basic representations of Path/Place expressions, inspired by cartographic analyses of PPs, but based on a pP dual-projection model, separating the root/lexical part from the functional/categorial part, as in Distributed Morphology (=DM). In so doing, the paper challenges traditional analyses of PPs as projecting a uniform Path over Place structure (with no bifurcating domain separation). It also provides essential ingredients allowing the decomposition of Place and Path words or expressions, including COINCIDENCE, CONTAIN, CONTACT , etc., or syntactic projections such AxPs, DeixPs, DegPs, ScaleP, GoalPs, etc., which play important syntactico-semantic roles in the grammar. Our analysis successfully accounts for complexity of prepositions or spatial expressions, their morphosyntactic alternations, variation, and polysemy.