ABSTRACT
The category preposition sits astride the traditional distinctions between open and closed classes and between lexical and grammatical words. Some prepositions clearly have independent lexical semantic content: e.g., It. con ‘with’ vs. senza ‘without’; sotto ‘under’ vs. sopra ‘above’. Others mark grammatical relations: e.g., It. a ‘to’ as the marker of the embedded subject in causatives – ho fatto pulire la casa a Gianni I-have made to-clean the house to G., ‘I made G. clean the house’ – or da ‘by, from’ as the marker of the demoted subject in passives – il collegio fufondato da Pio V ‘the college was founded by Pius V’. Closed classes (e.g., complementizers, articles) are exhaustively listable; prepositions at first sight might seem to be: It. a ‘to’, di ‘of’, da ‘from’, per ‘through’, in ‘in’, su ‘on’, con, etc. But two problems make it difficult to close the list: first, how do we distinguish between a complex preposition and a noun phrase with a prepositional dependent, e.g., It. a favore di ‘in favour of’, per via di ‘by means of’, in mezzo a ‘in the middle of’, a casa di ‘at the house of’? Second, how do we distinguish between prepositions and adverbs, e.g., It. prima ‘before’, dopo ‘after’, contro ‘against’, su ‘on’?
