English prepositions in Functional Discourse Grammar

Abstract

Adpositions have always been problematic in terms of analysis and representation: should they be regarded as lexical elements, with an argument structure, or as semantically empty grammatical elements, i.e. as operators or functions? Or could it be that some adpositions are lexical and others grammatical, or even that one and the same adposition can be either, dependent on its use in a particular context? In Functional Grammar (Dik 1997a,b) adpositions are analysed as grammatical elements, represented as functions expressing relations between terms (referring expressions). Various alternative treatments have been proposed within FG, all of which, however, fail to solve all the problems, or address all the relevant questions involved. This article offers an analysis of English prepositions within the model of Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2006, 2008), based on the semantic, syntactic and morphological evidence available and fully exploiting the novel features of this model.

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