Directionality and the Complementation of Dutch Adpositions

The syntactic realization of Dutch PPs is the result of an interaction of several factors. These include: the form of the complement (full NP or pronoun) and its semantics (animate or inanimate), the spatial semantics of the PP (directional or locative), and idiosyncratic lexical properties associated with particular prepositions. This paper presents a non-transformational approach to Dutch PP syntax that assumes multiple lexical entries for each adposition to produce the wide variety of PP structures observed. The lexical entries are systematically organized in an inheritance hierarchy with two major binary dimensions of variation, POSITION (preposition vs. postposition) and DIRECTIONALITY (directional vs. non-directional), with further partitions for different complement types (involving animacy and various possibilities for pronominalization). After showing how the proposed system accounts for the internal syntactic structure of Dutch adpositional phrases, the paper turns to some issues of external PP syntax, in particular the P-stranding phenomena found in Dutch.