PREPOSITIONAL COMPLEMENTISERS AND SPLIT CP STRUCTURE IN ENGLISH

English Prepositional Passive Constructions

An empirical overview of the properties of English prepositional passives is presented, followed by a discussion of formal approaches to the analysis of the various types of prepositional passives in HPSG. While a lexical treatment is available, the significant number of technical and conceptual difficulties encountered point to an alternative approach relying on constructional constraints. The...

English prepositional passive constructions

As noted by Huddleston and Pullum (2002, p. 1433), prepositional passives can be divided into two classes, depending on the syntactic function of the PP. In Type I prepositional passives, the PP is a complement whose prepositional head is idiomatically selected by the verb, as in (1b); in Type II prepositional passives as in (1c), the preposition is not part of a verbal idiom. Huddleston and Pu...

Aspect and the Distribution of Prepositional ResultativePhrases In English

Nouns and their prepositional phrase complements in English

This paper concerns one aspect of work in progress on a PhD thesis on the complementation of nouns in English (See Bowen (forthcoming)). The purpose of the thesis is to give a description of nouns and their complements which will prove of interest to linguists but will also be of interest, from a pedagogical point of view, to learners of English. Although there are extensive surveys of the noun...

RENEWAL IN THE LEFT PERIPHERY: ECONOMY AND THE COMPLEMENTISER LAYER By ELLY

This paper examines cyclical changes involving complementisers, for instance, whether in the history of English. Whether starts out as a pronoun and after frequent topicalisation is reanalysed as an element in the left-most layer of the sentence. The same is true with prepositional phrases that are fronted and then reanalysed as part of the CP layer. The paper uses a Minimalist approach in that...