the evolution of c-structure: prepositions and pps from indo-european to romance.pdf

The evolution of c-structure: prepositionsand PPs from Indo-European to Romance*

NIGEL VINCENT

Abstract

Within X-bar theory prepositions are standardly taken to constitute one ofthe core lexical categories along with verbs, nouns, and adjectives definableby the features [±V, ±N]. Synchronically, however they share propertieswith both lexical and functional categories, while diachronically they areusually the outcome of processes of grammaticalization affecting true lexicalcategories such as verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The present paper analyzesin detail the stages whereby prepositions in Latin and Romance evolve fromearlier adverbial particles and concludes that this diachronic trajectory isbest modeled within a framework that separates the relational structure ofa PP from its configurational representation. It is argued that lexical-functional grammar, with its systematic distinction between f-structure andc-structure, provides a better account of these changes than conventionalX-bar theory. In conclusion a possible role for optimality theory within aformal account of syntactic change is briefly sketched.

1. Introduction

Research in historical syntax sometimes seems in danger of polarizationinto two camps, each making diametrically opposed assumptions on anumber of issues including those pertinent to the present paper, namelyword order and constituency. On the one hand, generative historicalsyntax (cf. recent conference collections such as Battye and Roberts 1995;van Kemenade and Vincent 1997) follows synchronic work in that frame-work in assuming configurational structure as a property of UG.Languages may differ in overt linear order in virtue of different movementpossibilities and/or due to different settings of the directionality parameter(cf. Kayne 1994 for a proposal to eliminate the latter in favor of theformer and Roberts 1997a for an exploration of the diachronic

Linguistics 37–6 (1999), 1111–1153 0024–3949/99/0037–1111© Walter de Gruyter

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consequences thereof ), but all languages have some underlying order(indeed on Kayne’s proposal they all have the same underlying order), andthat order is in turn a reflection of configurational structure (cf. Kayne’s‘‘linear correspondence axiom’’). By contrast, most work on grammaticali-zation (Hopper and Traugott 1993: 50ff.) seems to treat word order as justthat — the linear arrangement of minimal syntactic elements — with noparticular regard to the principles or mechanisms (i.e. the ‘‘grammar’’) thatdetermine such order beyond an assumption of simple concatenation drivenby either syntactic or pragmatic considerations or both. To put it (perhapstoo) simply, generative grammar seems to err in the direction of assumingtoo much in the way of linear order/constituency, while proponents ofgrammaticalization assume too little.

A third possibility lies in what Bresnan (forthcoming a) calls ‘‘parallelcorrespondence theories.’’ Such approaches treat grammars as formalobjects for exactly the same good reasons as inspired the originalChomskyan enterprise (Chomsky 1957: 5) but do not require that therepresentation of grammatical relations (subject, object, complement, speci-fier, etc.) be couched in the same terms as the representation of overtlinguistic structure (case marking, work order, etc). One such theory isLFG, and we will argue that it has much to offer in reconciling the goalsfor diachronic syntax of the two approaches sketched in the previous para-graph. On the one hand, it provides a formalism within which issues canbe formulated and addressed with the precision and explicitness that wehave rightly come to expect in morphosyntactic research. On the otherhand, the formalism does not inherently privilege constituency and linearorder, which are instead seen as one particular type of linguistic realization(cf. Matthews 1981: chapter 12) of abstract grammatical relations ratherthan as the universal metalinguistic vehicle of those relations. The syntacti-cally relevant properties of a given sentence — henceforth f(unctional )-structure — are instead expressed in a feature-based notation subject to thebasic principle of unification. This principle determines how smallerf-structures are combined into larger ones while remaining properly neutralon the question of how they are expressed. Linguistic expression is deter-mined instead by the correspondences between f-structures and c-structures,where the latter may involve configurations, morphological patterns of caseand agreement, or any combination thereof.

A key feature then of the architecture of LFG is the separation off-structure and c-structure ( Kaplan and Bresnan 1982).1 For any givenlanguage or construction, the presence of constituency2 and its frequentconcomitant linear order can be seen for what it is: one of the ways —along with case/prepositions (dependent marking) and agreement (headmarking) — that languages use to realize their underlying grammatical

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relations. Languages, and individual constructions within languages, maythen differ in the extent of the evidence they offer for constituency justas they differ in the richness of their case and agreement systems. Thediachronic consequence of this is clear: just as the histories of languagesprovide many examples of the rise and fall of case and agreement systems,we should also look for the possibility that constituency may be theproduct and/or victim of the processes of grammatical change. To theextent that such situations arise, and can be adequately modeled, LFGcan be seen to retain the benefits of a formal approach to syntax whilestill characterizing the types of change that were the original impulsebehind work in grammaticalization. In the present paper, we shall exam-ine one such instance in detail — the changing relations between casesand prepositions in a historical cross-section from Indo-European tomodern Romance — before reflecting on the theoretical consequences ofan LFG-based approach to the study of morphosyntactic change. Ofparticular interest in this connection are the recent moves to inter-pret LFG in the light of optimality theory (Bresnan forthcoming a,forthcoming b, forthcoming c).

2. The problem of prepositions

Since the classic article by Jackendoff (1973), it has been standard practicewithin generative grammar to accord prepositions the status of a majorcategory alongside nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Yet the question is byno means clearcut. On the one hand the core prepositions of a languageseem to form a small enumerable class of items much like determinersor complementizers; on the other hand if we include so-called complexprepositions like in light of, by virtue of, in common with, etc., then theborder with NPs is no longer clear (cf. also Lehmann 1998). The conceptof grammaticalization offers a ready answer here. Original NPs may withthe passage of time become compacted down into relation-marking ele-ments. English because of is a classic instance, where the presence of thelinking of betrays the earlier nominal source. Moreover, prepositionscross-linguistically provide good evidence for the principle of grammati-calization sometimes called ‘‘Gabelentz’s law’’ (Vincent 1993: 145), viz.

(1) Alle Afformativen waren ursprunglich selbstandige Worter[All grammatical markers were in origin independent words]

Obedience to this ‘‘law’’ is one respect in which prepositions behave likeother functional categories, whose realizations are also not historicallystable. In fact prepositions show a wide range of etymological sources,

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including verbs, nouns, participles, adjectives, adverbs, and various typesof particle ( Kortmann and Konig 1992: 672; and cf. Vincent 1997a: 212for a compilation of representative examples from Italo-Romance).Consultation of the historical grammars of any language with sufficientrecorded time depth will reveal that the modern prepositions are (almost)always the product of various grammaticalization processes. In thisrespect prepositions differ from nouns, verbs, and adjectives, which typi-cally retain their categorical status over the full length of their recordedhistory even though they may undergo quite complex and many-layeredsemantic shifts. A second property of (some) prepositions, which alliesthem to the class of functional categories, is that they are used to expresspurely syntactic relations rather than expressing their own semanticcontent. Thus, English of is often argued to be a case marker licensing adependent nominal inside a NP/DP, and the demoted subject in theFrench causative construction is introduced by a, conventionally glossedas ‘to’ but in fact serving to express a particular grammatical relation.Prepositions then are somewhat equivocal members of the class of majorlexical categories. Although they often do have independent lexicalcontent — such as English up/down, on/off, under/over, before/after, andequivalent items in many other languages — they just as often do not.

Two possible solutions to this ambivalence suggest themselves. Thefirst involves abandoning the idea that there is a unified category corre-sponding to the traditional class of prepositions and distinguishingbetween ‘‘pure’’ prepositions on the one hand and case markers on theother. This approach has found many advocates within generativegrammar. Thus, Rooryck (1996: 226–227) writes,

The property which sets prepositions apart from Case markers such as of and tois the fact that they are associated with specific thematic roles (Comitative/Instrument for with, Theme for about). . .. This distinction between lexical preposi-tions and functional preposition-like Case markers is one that is found in manylanguages.

I will not discuss here the technical details of Rooryck’s analysis, whichare designed to unify the assignment of case (in a generative sense) underminimalist assumptions very different from those that will be adoptedhere. Rather we may note a number of significant weaknesses in thisgeneral strategy of splitting the erstwhile class of prepositions into two.First, we have no explanation for the fact that the items that serve ascase markers are homophonous with prepositions. It will be a matter oflexical arbitrariness that for instance the French causative subject markerhas the same phonological shape as the preposition expressing the the-matic role goal. Yet we know that cross-linguistically it is a robust


generalization that on the one hand goal prepositions are often used toexpress the dative, and that on the other the item expressing the demotedcausee subject is often the same as that which marks the dative case (cf.Ackerman and Moore 1999 for recent discussion and full references).Moreover, it is not always easy to draw a distinction between the two.Rooryck (1996: 226) cites English to in Karl gave a book to Fred as aninstance of dative case, but one might just as easily call it the marker ofthe thematic role recipient or beneficiary (or even a more abstract kindof goal ). The range of nuances in this construction is notorious (Green1974) and indeed there is some evidence that the more the constructionexpresses a nonprototypcial relation between giver and recipient, themore likely it is that the alleged case marker to will be given up in favorof the double-object construction. Thus, where give behaves as a ‘‘lightverb’’ taking a nominalized verb as object, the preferred form is forinstance Karl gave Fred a slap rather than ?Karl gave a slap to Fred(Green 1974; Gisborne 1999).

A further objection to treating case-marking uses of apparent preposi-tions as nonprepositional lies in the fact that, in those languages thathave overt morphological case, both types assign their own case. Thusconsider the following near-minimal pair from Latin cited by Molinelli(1996: 83):

(2) a. (Pl, Capt 400)numquid aliud visINTERR other.NEUTSG.ACC want.2SG.PRESpatri nuntiari?father.DATSG tell.PASS.INF‘Is there anything else you wish to be told to your father?’

b. (Pl, Capt 360)quae ad patrem viswhich.NEUTPL.ACC to father.ACCSG want.2SG.PRESnuntiaritell.PASS.INF‘which things you wish to be told to your father’

In (2a) the recipient of the information is expressed by the dative casepatri, but in (2b) it is expressed by the construction ad patrem ‘to thefather’. The point here is that the morphological case of patrem in thesecond alternative is accusative as required by the preposition ad ‘to’ inall its uses, whether as here when it substitutes for an independent dativecase or when it is used as a purely prepositional marker of destinationas in venit ad me ‘he came to me’. If we have to distinguish case-markingad from prepositional ad in Latin — and the example could be multiplied

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a thousandfold for Latin, Greek, Russian, Lithuanian, and kindred lan-guages — then it becomes a matter of coincidence that all the differentuses of ad require to be followed by the accusative rather than any othercase. And indeed the mere property of assigning a case formally identifiessuch items as prepositional even when in terms of their function theymay be labelled ‘‘case markers.’’

This last example highlights a final problem with the analysis thatseparates case markers from prepositions, namely that it will anyway benecessary to make a similar distinction for simple case forms. Just asuses of prepositions fall into case-marking and semantic uses, so toocases may be separated into ‘‘concrete’’ (also called ‘‘local’’) and ‘‘gram-matical’’ ( Kuryłowicz 1964). On this view the locative in Sanskrit orRussian for instance is a semantically definable case with a specificthematic role while the accusative is principally a marker of the grammati-cal relation object.3 Interestingly, within this tradition too the dative hasbeen problematic. Szemerenyi (1996: 158, note 1) recalls Hubschmann’s(1875: 131) uncertainty as to how to class the dative and nearly a centurylater Kuryłowicz (1964: chapter 8) is still in doubt. The problem is thefamiliar one of where to draw the line between arguments and adjunctsand has nothing to do with whether these are realized through a systemof cases or a system of prepositions or a mixture of the two. Rather thandistinguishing between ‘‘pure’’ prepositions and case markers, therefore,which leads to the absurdity of a parallel distinction between pure casesand case-marking cases, we need to have a system that recognizes a classof prepositions, where these are required by the syntax of the languagein question, but allows an internal distinction to be drawn between (atleast) two subclasses. Moreover, whatever mechanism is utilized to drawthe distinction within the prepositional class should naturally extend tothe parallel distinction between semantic and grammatical uses of cases.

One such mechanism is available within HPSG. In this framework, allprepositions are characterized as the partition (=value) PREP of the sort(=feature) SUBSTANTIVE, a treatment that is very close to the tradi-tional view of prepositions as a small but autonomous word class. Thecase-marking uses of prepositions — called ‘‘nonpredicative’’ by Pollardand Sag (1994: 255–256; 347ff.) — are handled by setting the value forthe CONTENT feature of the PP as equal to that of the argument ofthe preposition. This has the same effect as an earlier proposal withinGPSG that such uses were syntactically PPS but corresponded to NPtypes in the intensional semantics. The problem from the perspective ofthe present study is that this eminently natural account of internal distinc-tions within the class of prepositions does not easily generalize to ananalogous treatment of the two types of case. We will therefore adopt


the LFG solution, in which all semantically contentful items have a valuefor a feature PRED. Items that do not have such a value are interpretedas having a purely grammatical function (see section 5 for the details ofthis proposal ).

The fact that prepositions in many languages typically govern casesjust as verbs do also poses a problem for the standard X-bar account ofprepositions even when they are behaving as a major category. It seemsperverse to characterize them as [−N, −V ] since it makes the proto-typical verbal properties of taking an object and of determining theobject’s case depend on the [−N] feature rather than the [+V ] one, butthis is the only way to achieve the requisite generalization within thecanonical X-bar feature framework. An alternative feature characteriza-tion might therefore be the one proposed in Jackendoff (1977) where thedefining properties are not categorical [±N, ±V ] but relational[±subj, ±obj ]. Verbs and prepositions would then share the property ofbeing [+obj ], but be distinguished in that verbs are also [+subj ] whileprepositions are [−subj ].4 Yet even this is not a completely satisfactorysolution, and the evidence of history suggests a more complex state ofaffairs. Whereas verbs can for the most part be assumed to govern casesas far back in history as we can go,5 there is clear evidence that the nexus‘‘preposition+case form,’’ which is so much a part of the traditionalgrammar of Latin, German, Russian, etc., is itself the product of aprocess of grammaticalization. This suggests the desirability of a morescalar kind of feature base such as that proposed in Anderson (1997),though we will not explore the matter further in the present context.

Another, and logically separate, property of prepositions in modernRomance languages is that they head prepositional phrases, characterizedby strict linear order between the members of the PP and specialco-occurrence restrictions between the prepositions and their specifiers.PPs, then, are of interest because they allow us to track the separatehistorical development of both government and constituency. The histori-cal facts (to be examined in more detail in the next section) present achallenge to a universalist X-bar theoretic understanding of phrase struc-ture. On this view, preposition and PP are part of the major categoricalcore defined in terms of the features (whether [±N, ±V ] or [±subj,±obj ]) and the bar levels. The language-particular choice is whetherthere is a P or not. If there is, then PP, Spec of P, Complement of Pcome at once and ‘‘for free’’ in virtue of the instantiation of the universalX-bar schema for the category P. The data we examine here suggest, onthe contrary, that the classic ingredients of a PP — the P itself, the case-governed complement of P, and the category Spec of P — are the productof separate historical processes, and at given historical stages some of

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these ingredients may exist independently of others. Moreover, the changedescribed here is unusual in that it involves the ‘‘capture’’ of an argumentby an item that previously had no argument structure. This is in contrastto the more commonly studied types of syntactic change that involve lossof argument or theta structure (Roberts 1985, 1997b; Barron 1997). Itis also unusual — at least from the perspective of X-bar theory — inthat the prepositional head is the grammaticalized result of somethingthat was in origin a specifier. This last point is, however, consistent withthe idea that when an item grammaticalizes, in generative terms it moves‘‘down’’ the tree (Roberts 1997b). All in all, prepositions are a complexand difficult category both synchronically and diachronically, and a closerlook at the historical scenario is clearly called for. I will start from Latinand work back to Indo-European and forward to Romance.

3. Case and prepositions from Indo-European to Romance

In this section we will document the stages whereby the full-fledgedprepositional syntax of the modern Romance languages emerges. (Thediscussion inevitably involves a certain amount of detailed supportiveargument to establish the historical data. Readers whose interest is princi-pally in the theoretical conclusions that we argue to follow from thesepatterns may prefer to skip ahead to the summary of this section con-tained in section 3.8, and thence to the more directly theoretical sections4–6. See also the discussion in Lehmann [1995: ch. 3.4.1.4–6 ].)

3.1. Particles, preverbs, and prepositions

In Latin we find a range of items that are both prepositions, exemplifiedin (3a), and also components of compound verb stems (henceforth‘‘preverbs’’), as in (3b). Thus,

(3) a. sub ‘under’, trans ‘across’, in ‘in, on’, ab ‘from’, ob ‘against’,cum ‘with’, ex ‘out of ’, pro ‘for’, etc.;

b. submittere ‘to put underneath’, permittere ‘to let through’,transmittere ‘to send across’, praemittere ‘to send ahead’, etc.;sufferre ‘to undergo’, transferre ‘to carry across’, perferre ‘tocarry through’, offerre ‘to present’, conferre ‘to gather’,etc.; subligare ‘to tie below’, obligare ‘to bind’, colligare ‘toassemble’, deligare ‘to select’, etc.

A link between them can be established through two frequently cited


remarks by the grammarian Festus on the language of early prayers(cf. most recently Cuzzolin 1995):

(4) a. Sub vos placo, in precibus fere cum dicitur, significat id, quodsupplico, ut in legibus transque dato et endoque plorato‘When people say, mostly in prayers, sub vos placo, it meansthe same as supplico and is like the expressions transque datoand endoque plorato in the laws’

b. ob vos sacro, in quibusdam precationibus est, pro vos obsecro,ut sub vos placo, pro supplico‘ob vos sacro in certain prayers stands for vos obsecro, just assub vos placo stands for supplico’

Here the classical forms supplico, obsecro ‘I implore, beseech’ are decom-posed into their constituent parts sub placo and ob sacro and the objectis placed between them. In the other cited examples the preverbs endo(an earlier form of in) and trans are separated from their verb stems (dato‘give’, plorato ‘beg’) and act as hosts for the clitic conjunction -que ‘and’.Other early examples also imply the independence of items that subse-quently occur only in construction with a verb or a noun. Festus againquotes a passage from the famous legal text of the fourth–fifth centuryBCE, the Twelve Tables:

(5) si calvitur pedemve struit, manum endo iacito‘if he plays tricks or runs off, lay hands on (him)’

Here endo occurs in isolation but in immediate preverbal position in away that is not attested in other texts even in the Old Latin period, butwhich has evident congeners elsewhere in Indo-European.6 Thus, inAncient Greek and Sanskrit we find examples such as the following (citedafter Coleman 1991: 327; and Hock 1996: 221, note 22):

(6) (Il 12.234)eks ara de: toi epeita theoı phrenas o: lesan autoı‘so you see the gods themselves thereupon destroyed away his senses’

(7) (RV 3.1.12c)ud usrıya: janita: yo jaja:naout cow.ACCPL creator.NOMSG REL create.3SG.PERF‘who as creator created forth the cows’

In (6) the adverb eks ‘away’ serves to reinforce the completive sense ofthe verb (one may compare the effect of English up in Eat your food up!).A similar function is served in (7) by the adverb ud ‘out, forth’.

Items like sub, endo, and ob were not in origin, therefore, prepositionsbut rather sentence particles or adverbs that could occupy a variety of

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positions in the sentence.7 The three positions that will be of particularinterest in the present context are

i. sentence-initial and separated from the verb (as in [4], [6 ], and [7])ii. unstressed and adjacent to the verbiii. before a local case formFor Latin, the alternation between the first two of these is only attested

residually in the archaic examples adduced in (4) but is entirely systematicin Vedic (Renou 1933; Pinault 1995) and is also found in a number ofother early Indo-European languages (the traditional name for this con-struction is tmesis).8 A rather similar kind of alternation between thesecond and third possibilities is found with a word like only in English:

(8) a. Fred has only published two articlesb. Fred has published only two articles

Here too the interpretation of (8a) when pronounced with neutral intona-tion involves only having scope over two articles despite its adjacency tothe verb and its separation from the NP over which it takes scope.

The last property of these ancient items that will be of relevance hereis their prosodic behavior. There is general consensus that when separatedand placed in clause-initial position the particle bore its own stress; whenplaced before the verb it was unstressed. Thus, Renou (1933: 50) writes,‘‘le preverbe tend a etre proclitique en subordonnee, ailleurs tonique etautonome’’ [the preverb tends to be proclitic in a subordinate clause andelsewhere stressed and free]. From this it follows that the majority ofinstances of preverbs in main clauses are separate from the verb andhence bear stress. Indeed Renou (1933: 52) goes on to observe that ‘‘laseparation peut etre consideree comme courante, sinon tout a fait commenormale’’ [separation may be considered as common, if not indeed ascompletely normal ].9

To sum up, then, in the ancestor language a deictic or orientationalsentence particle could bear focal stress in its own right in absolute initialposition or it could attach to a sentence constituent over which it hadparticular scope or it could default to the unstressed preverbal position(we assume an unmarked clause-final position for the stressed verb).10

Given the foregoing, it would be wrong to see sub vos placo in (4a) asinvolving a preposition at all (Cuzzolin 1995: 134). Vos is accusative asobject of placo and sub is a sentence particle; as Coleman (1991: 324)notes, these particles could occur with intransitive verbs as well as transi-tive ones, and in the case of the transitive verb it is the particle that isomissible, not the noun, a distributional property not consistent withthese items being analyzed as prepositions.11 In the subsequent historyof Latin and Romance we find a number of changes that come together


to create first the class of prepositions and in due course the rigidlyconfigurational PPs with which we are familiar from the modernlanguages.

3.2. The acquisition of argument structure

A clear property that distinguishes, cross-linguistically, adpositions fromparticles is that the former have their own argument structure, both inthe semantic sense of selecting particular theta roles and in the syntacticsense of determining the case form of that argument. The developmentfrom Indo-European into the daughter languages is no exception and theformer particles come to take a dependent argument in a fixed case. Thesource of this change lies in the use of the original particles as specifiersof the local cases (instrumental, ablative, and locative).12 Thus a particlesuch as sub ‘under’ is not inherently directional or locational; it simplyexpresses an orientation. If it modifies a directional use of the accusative,the meaning will be ‘(move) under and to(wards)’; if it modifies a locativethe meaning will be ‘(be) under and in/at’. It is only at a later stagethat the particle and the case form are inseparable, and that we have thesituation in which the preposition may be said to ‘‘take’’ or govern aparticular case form. Thus what was in origin a specifier comes to be ahead. Lehmann (1995: 88) expresses the change somewhat differently,suggesting that the spatial concepts lexicalized by the original particleshave an inherent semantic argument that expresses the deictic point ofreference. The change then involves the syntacticization of this earliersemantic relation. Whichever perspective one prefers to adopt, it is worthnoting that such an origin fairly straightforwardly explains what manyhave taken to be a puzzle (Baldi 1979; Joseph 1991; Bauer 1995: chap-ter 5), namely the linear order whereby Latin, usually regarded as anOV or head-final language, has prepositions rather than postpositions.13All the available evidence points to specifiers in Indo-European being onthe left. There is no conflict then with a putative I-E OV order on thisinterpretation, a point that rather surprisingly seems to have been missedin the literature (cf. further in section 3.4 below).

3.3. Divergence of preverb and preposition

As long as the adverbial particles are free to move around and occupyvarious positions in the sentence it is reasonable to think of them assingle items that have multiple positional possibilities (think again of

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English items such as all, only, and even, and their counterparts in otherlanguages). Once, however, the sequence particle plus case form is reana-lyzed in the way described above, the range of distribution of the particleis reduced and we have the beginning of a split into particles and preposi-tions. At the same time, and for independent reasons, the particle, whenadjacent to the verb, comes to form a lexical unit with it and to undergosemantic shifts that often obscure the etymological function of the pre-verb. Thus obligare is rare in its etymological sense of ‘to bind around,against’ (<ob+ ligare) and the more usual and surviving sense of ‘oblige,make liable’ does not have a separable component of meaning that couldbe attributed to the ob-prefix. Similarly, permittere originally meant ‘tolet go through, to let loose’ (<per ‘through’+mittere ‘to send, cause togo’) but already by the time of Caesar and Cicero (first century BCE)had acquired the meaning ‘to allow’, which is all that survives in Frenchpermettre, Italian permettere, etc. This kind of lexicalization is a familiarprocess in such circumstances and is described for the Brazilian languageNadeb by Weir (1986); see also the studies collected in Rousseau (1995).For more detailed studies of the Latin situation, see Lehmann (1983)and Rosen (1992).

3.4. Word order I: preposition vs. postposition

Perhaps the most striking property of the newly emergent prepositionalconstructions is the rigidity of linear order they exhibit: the order isalways P NP and the two items are very rarely separated by interveningmaterial. In the larger Latin context, this has been seen as surprisingbecause (a) Latin word order otherwise shows a fair degree of freedom,and (b) if there is a dominant tendency, it is for the verb to follow theobject so we might have expected a similar linear order to hold betweenan adposition and its object (Hawkins 1983). How are we to explain thisstate of affairs?

Baldi (1979) suggests the following sequence of events:

I. attraction of unstressed particles to the preverbal slot, which wouldbe consistent with the general verb-final typology reconstructablefor I-E;

II. the univerbation of preverb and verb to create compounds of thepermittere, circumire type (cf. section 3.3 above);

III. the refinement of the case semantics of the argument of such verbsby the duplication of the preverb in a parallel prenominal position:trans flumen transire/transducere lit. ‘to (cause to) cross across theriver’;


IV. the extension of the prenoun+noun groups thus formed to othercontexts where the prenominal element is not supported by apreverbal element;

V. the eventual loss of the transparent preverbal element oncelexicalization of preverb+verb sets in: e.g. inducere comes to mean‘introduce, persuade’ and the sense of ‘lead in’ is now expressed byin+NP ducere.

The problem with this proposal is that the key sentence type — transflumen transire — has only a limited attestation, in particular in writerslike Caesar, Cicero, Livy, etc. (i.e. first century BCE and after; cf. alsoNocentini 1992: 228; Coleman 1991: 332). It is not found in early prosewriters such as Cato (234–149 BCE). Even in those writers in which itis found, it is not always used and the verb is often treated as a simpletransitive (even to the extent of allowing a passive: e.g. Taurus transirinon potest ‘The Taurus mountains cannot be crossed’ [Cic Att 5,21]). Itis better therefore to regard this construction as an artefact of literaryprose of the classical period, and thus something that came into existencelong after prepositions had been established in the language, and perhapseven in virtue of the establishment of prepositions, rather than as themissing link between preverbal and prepositional syntax.

Joseph (1991: 188) also suggests that the apparent anomaly of boththe contiguity of preposition and noun and their relative order in thebroader Latin context calls for some explanation. He too looks to thepreverbal pattern that had established itself with the verb as a model,reinforced by what he claims is a conspiracy for Latin to have morphosyn-tactic clusters in which the inflected word is final. Thus, given the choicebetween per fugam ‘through flight’ and *fugam per, he suggests only theformer is consistent with the morpholgoical ‘‘target’’ of Latin. There isan inherent problem of teleology in this mode of explanation, but in anycase there are empirical arguments against Joseph’s position. Not onlyare there many instances of elements cliticizing in Latin after the inflec-tion — the already cited enclitic conjunction -que is a case in point asare the deictic and emphatic particles contained in items like idem ‘same’,hic ‘this’, etc. (originally *is-dem, hi-ce) — but in Oscan we find preciselythe development of a new inflectional subsystem out of agglutinatedpostpositions (Nocentini 1992).14

Nocentini (1992: 227–230) in fact suggests that the origins of thematter lie earlier in time. The most common inherited patterns areNP-P-V and P-NP-V. The former yields the preverb construction, NP[P-V ], and the latter the prepositional one, [P-NP] V. However, whilethis scenario narrows down the range of options, the only pattern it rules

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out absolutely (and correctly) is the possibility of a ‘‘postverb,’’ whichwould require as a starting point the unattested sequence *NP-V-P. SinceNP-P-V does occur, we still need an explanation for why that doesn’tyield a bracketing [NP-P] V, thus creating postpositions. InterestinglyCraig and Hale (1998) propose just such a string as the precondition forthe development of relational preverbs out of postpositions in theChibchan language Rama and the Maku language Nadeb ( Weir 1986):that is, [NP-P] V is reanalyzed as NP [P-V ]. The fact that the changethat must be ruled out in Latin has occurred elsewhere in the world’slanguages means that we cannot give up on the search for a specialproperty of Latin that allowed P-NP-V to produce prepositions and yetblocked postpositions from developing out of NP-P-V.

The clue to the answer, I would suggest, lies in the fact, already noted,that in the ancestor language the preverbal/prepositional elements wereinherently tonic when separated from the verb, a situation that as wehave seen is still fully documentable by the time of the Rigveda (approxi-mately 1000 BCE). It is the unaccented form that migrates to andcliticizes on the verb:15 the verb is the unmarked sentence head and anatural attractor of such sentence-level particles in the unmarked —hence unstressed — case. Joseph’s discussion of the relative accent of Pand NP (1991: 188–189) starts out on the right track but then makesthe wrong assumption, viz. that the P is proclitic on the NP. This mayhave been the later situation (cf. the remark by Quintilian that headduces), but we would suggest that the formation of prepositionscould only come about if P and V were split by the NP and that insuch a circumstance P bears its own accent (cf. the different stresses inEnglish only and even in adnominal and adverbal position) just asin Vedic.

The stressed particle naturally occurs in initial position, so thatunstressed elements — very commonly pronouns — will follow the par-ticle by the normal Wackernagel effect. We thus get a very commonpattern (italic means stressed and=marks a clitic boundary):

(9) P=pronoun ... V: sub=vos placo; ob=vos sacro(cf.endo=que plorato)

It is this pattern that provides the context for the reanalysis in which the(in origin pronominal ) element attached to the particle becomes interpre-ted as an argument of the particle, thereby transforming the particle intoa preposition.

A further attraction of this account is that it explains the virtuallyexceptionless nature of the process. Contrast a putative application toIndo-European of the reanalysis model postulated for Rama and Nadeb


by Craig and Hale (1988) in which there is a postpositional phase priorto the reanalysis of the postposition as a preverb, something that theyshow happened to different degrees for different members of the class.This would predict a proportion of postpositions, with perhaps a gradualdominance of prepositions over time as the other word-order changestake place, but this is not what we find. The striking thing about theP-NP order is, as Joseph (1991: 188) rightly noted and Bauer (1995:128ff.) endorses, that it is early and almost absolute and runs counter tothe prevailing OV typology.

Nonetheless, there are signs of apparent postpositional behavior inearly Latin texts and these need to be explained. It is commonly assumedthat such cases — exemplified in (10) — require the postulation of anarchaic Latin stage in which postpositions were normal (cf. Bauer 1995:130ff. for a recent restatement of this view):

(10) mecum ‘me+with’quocum ‘which+with’ted endo ‘you+ in’quibus ex ‘which+out of ’quemadmodum ‘which+to+way’=how’quamobrem ‘which+on account of+thing’= ‘why’

In fact they fit in rather well with our story and do not require thepostulation of a separate postpositional phase of the language. To explainmecum and the like we only have to assume that there could be competi-tion for the initial stressed position between the particle and a stressedpronoun. If the latter wins, the particle is forced into second positionand as a relatively unstressed element itself cliticizes: me=cum venit,typically written as a single word.

In the other type of circumstance — exemplified by quocum, quibusex — we have a similar kind of competition for first position thoughhere the motivation is different. The qu-words are subject to a grammati-cal rule by which words of this case occupy first position, and if this isgiven priority over the initial-particle rule, then the latter will be relegatedto second position. Broadwell (1999) describes a strikingly parallelpattern in the Otomanguean language, San Dionicio Ocotepec Zapotec(SDZ). In declarative clauses this language has prepositions, (11a), butin interrogatives the prepositions are blocked and appear instead aspostpositions, (11b).

(11) a. u-diny juaany beh’cw re’ cun yagCOM-hit John dog that with stick‘John hit that dog with a stick’

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b. xhıı cun u-diny juaany beh’cw re’what with COM-hit John dog that‘What did John hit that dog with?’

Broadwell also interprets this reversal of the expected order in terms ofcompetition. More precisely, he views order within constituents as duenot to fixed phrase-structure rules but to the interaction of optimalitytheory constraints (for further discussions of this approach see section 6).Although the existence of postposed forms in Sanskrit is widely cited infavor of an earlier postpositional phase, the detailed study of Renou(1933: esp. 52ff.) suggests that the determining principle here too is accen-tual and that in general postpositions are rare in Sanskrit. Nocentini(1992) similarly adduces a prosodic explanation for the origin of postposi-tions in Umbrian.16 Broadwell’s data confirm the typological possibilitythat Latin particles may in special circumstances be inverted in clause-initial position without there being any consequent need to postulate aperiod in which postpositions held sway over prepositions. Genuinepostpositions are in a minority and arise from another source, namelynouns (cf. note 12).

To sum up, then, we have two independent but converging patternsthat generate prepositions in a language like Latin. On the other hand,since prepositions originate as specifiers and since specifiers precede thecase form they modify, we predict the order ‘‘P+caseform’’ rather thanthe reverse. Second, separated preverbs would normally occur at the leftedge of the clause and therefore necessarily to the left of any pronominalitems that might later, by reanalysis, come to be interpreted as theirarguments. Apparent instances of postposition (except perhaps Hittite —see note 14) would arise as the byproduct of competing prosodic require-ments and would not reflect an earlier stage of genuine postpositionalsyntax.

3.5. Word order II: PP-internal fronting

In the previous section we have seen how competition for front positionin the clause leads question words to precede the prepositions that governthem. The pattern thus generated — quem ad locum et quam ob rem‘where and why?’ (Plaut Men 823), qua de re ‘what about?’ (Ter And184) — bears some resemblance to another pattern found within pre-positional phrases, what we might call the magna cum laude effect. Herethe adjective that modifies the complement of the preposition occursin first position within the PP. This pattern most typically affects


quantificational, intensifying, and deictic adjectives such as multus ‘much,many’, magnus ‘great’, maximus ‘greatest’, summus ‘top’, nimius ‘toogreat’, mirus ‘wonderful’, hic ‘this’, etc. Such adjectives seem to be inher-ently emphatic and are natural candidates for the leftmost position inthe constituent.17 If they occupy this position, they too will trigger thiskind of constituent-internal (or perhaps colon-internal ) Wackernageleffect18 and force the preposition to be enclitic.

The data reviewed so far suggest a certain freedom in the word orderof Latin prepositional phrases, though this freedom is not absolute. Wehave seen that a particular class of adjectives commonly precedes thepreposition. In poetic language, a wider range of adjectives and alsogenitives dependent on the argument of the preposition may precede (thefollowing examples are taken from Penney 1999):

(12) a. (Ennius Satur 41V )Nestoris ad patriamNestor.GEN at homeland.ACC‘in Nestor’s homeland’

b. (Vergil Aen 3.18)Libyae vertuntur ad orasLibya.GENSG turn.3PSG to shore.ACCPL‘they turn toward the shores of Libya’

As (12b) shows, such fronting may even move the genitive out of theprepositional phrase altogether, and these constructions seem to be partof poetic style often driven by metrical considerations. Penney (1999) forexample notes that the only occurrence of this pattern to be found in theplain narrative prose text of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico is quorum per finis‘through whose territory’, where the fronted genitive quorum is a relativepronoun, which would, as we have seen, have undergone this movementin any case. I have checked for comparison another and earlier prosetext, one moreover noted for its lack of rhetorical elaboration — Cato’sagricultural handbook De Agri Cultura of the second century BCE —and Penney’s generalization holds true: instances such as quo in agro ‘inwhich field’ (VI.4) are found but otherwise both adjective or genitiveand noun follow the preposition. Similarly poetic is the construction inwhich the noun precedes the preposition and its modifier follows (cf. alsoBauer 1995: 135–136):

(13) a. (Lucr 5.1382)cava per calamorumhole.ACCPL through reedpipe.GENPL‘through the holes of the reedpipes’

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b. (Vergil Aen 4.257)litus harenosum ad Libyaeshore.ACCSG sandy.ACCSG to Libya.GENSG‘to the sandy shore of Libya’

c. (Ennius Ann 187)arbusta per altatimber-trees.ACC through tall.ACC‘through tall timber trees’

In this respect I agree entirely with the distinction Bauer (1995) drawsbetween those patterns that are attributable to stylistic factors and thosethat properly feed into a diachronic account. I differ from her, however,in that I see the changes in question as the gradual fixing of syntacticconfigurationality rather than as a shift from a head-final (‘‘left-branching’’ in her terms) to a head-initial (‘‘right-branching’’) PP. I seeno difficulty in accepting the usual X-bar account of category structurefor Modern French, Italian, etc., but I would hesitate to project itbackward onto Latin and Proto-Indo-European. One crucial area, there-fore, in which our approaches differ concerns the role of specifier of PP,to which I now turn.

3.6. Specifier of PP

The only variant on P-NP order then that needs to be accounted forwithin the core syntax of (nonliterary) Latin is that in which a quantifica-tional or intensifying adjective immediately precedes the preposition. Thefact of immediate linear precedence suggests that this ‘‘displaced’’ adjec-tive is still within the PP, a property that falls out naturally from theprosodic competition principle established above.19 Moreover, note thatthere is often no semantic difference in such examples between interpre-ting the adjective as attached to the noun and as taking scope over thewhole PP; in either case summa cum laude, for example, means ‘at thehighest point on the scale of praise’. This in turn suggests that we shouldconsider the relation of this construction to other forms of prepositionalmodification.

Adverbial modification of a prepositional construction is exemplifiedin the following:

(14) a. (Cie Or 2.64.259)si ad te bene ante lucem venissetif to you well before light come.PLUPF.SUBJ.3SG‘if he had come to you well before daybreak’


b. (Liv I,9)longe ante alias specie insignemlong before other.FEM.ACCPL beauty famed.ACCSG‘(a woman) famed for her beauty greatly above others’

c. (Caes BG 6.9)paulo supra eum locuma little above that place‘not far beyond that place’

d. (Tac Ann 5.3)haud multum post mortem eiusnot much after death her‘shortly after her death’

Such degree expressions were commonly but not necessarily placed beforethe preposition, in other words in the same position as the adjective insumma cum laude. However, it seems clear that in earlier texts in particularthe PP and its degree modifier could be separated. The following examplesrelate to the item usque, glossed in Lewis and Short (1879) as ‘‘all theway to or from any limit of space or time, etc.’’ This item is of particularinterest both because it later evolves from a fixed pre-prepositional posi-tion into part of an etymologically complex preposition in French jusqu’a(<de usque ad) ‘until’, and because it is the nearest we can come in Latinto an item that only modifies prepositional and adverbial constructionsand thus has the same diagnostic function that an item like right has inEnglish:20

(15) a. (Cic Rosc Com 7,20)ab imis unguibus usque ad verticemfrom bottom.ABLPL nail.ABLPL right to top.ACCSGsummumhighest.ACCSG‘from the top of his head to the tips of his toes’

b. (Nep. Hann 2.1)usque a rubro mariright from red.ABLSG sea.ABLSG‘right from the red sea’

c. (Cic. Quint 3,12)trans Alpes usque transferturacross Alps.ACC right carry.PRES.PASS.3SG‘he is carried right across the Alps’

d. (Plin 4,12,21)ab Attica ad Thessaliam usquefrom Attica.ABL to Thessaly.ACC right‘from Attica right to Thessaly’

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e. (Ter Ad 90)mulcavit usque ad mortembeat.PERF.3SG right to death.ACC‘he beat [them] to death’

The examples in (15) show clearly that usque can both precede, as in (15a),(15b), and (15e), and follow, as in (15c) and (15d), the PP it modifies. Itis only in later usage, presaging that which is found in Romance, thatthe specifier of a prepositional phrase has a fixed linear position. In sum,the fixing of the position of the specifier, whether adjectival as in the caseof the summus class of items or adverbial as with usque, longe, etc., postdatesby several centuries the fixing of the position of the preposition. As examplesof this later usage with an item, totum ‘whole’, which did not have sucha function in the classical language, consider the following from thefourth-century CE text Peregrinatio Aegeriae:21

(16) a. (I,2)totum per valle illawhole through valley that‘right through the valley’

b. (II,3)totum per mediam vallem ipsamwhole through middle valley the‘right through the middle of the valley’

3.7. Morphosyntactic equivalence of PPs and case

It is a commonplace of Romance historical syntax that the grammaticalfunctions of the dative case — the marker of the indirect object — andthe genitive case — the marker of a noun dependent on another noun —came to be replaced by grammaticalized uses of the prepositions ad ‘to,toward’ and de ‘down, about’ respectively. What is less commonlyemphasized but is of particular importance in the context of the presentdiscussion is that this development took place over many hundreds ofyears. Thus, consider again the pair of virtually equivalent examples fromPlautus (254–184 BCE) in (2), repeated here as (17):

(17) a. (Capt 400)numquid aliud visINTERR other.NEUTSG.ACC want.2SG.PRESpatri nuntiari?father.DATSG tell.PASS.INF‘Is there anything else you wish to be told to your father?’


b. (Capt 360)quae ad patrem viswhich.NEUTPL.ACC to father.ACCSG want.2SG.PRESnuntiaritell.PASS.INF‘You wish these things to be told to your father’

The choice here may well have been dictated by metrical considerationssince the dative case patri and the prepositional phrase ad patrem havedifferent numbers of syllables, but even so it is hard to believe that theoption would have been available in the first place if the expressions hadnot been semantically equivalent or almost so. This in turn requires thatthe grammar at this stage of the language be able to capture the fact thatboth a bare case form and a prepositional phrase can satisfy the indirectobject requirement of the verb nuntiare ‘to tell, report’.

There are similarly early examples of de+NP being used where classi-cal norms would have dictated a genitive (again from Molinelli 1996,who provides ample documentation and valuable discussion):

(18) a. (Plautus Ps 1164)memento ergo dimidium istinc mihi deremember.IMP therefore half.ACC thence me.DAT ofpraeda darebooty.ABLSG give.INF‘Remember then to give me half of the booty from there’

b. (Cato Agr 96.1)faecem de vino bonodregs.ACCSG of wine.ABLSG good.ABLSG‘dregs of good wine’

At the same time there are genitives and datives being used in similarcontexts by writers over half a millennium later. Compare the examplein (19) where there is both a genitive case (loci ipsius) and then aprepositional phrase de pomis ‘of the fruit’. Note too the dative case nobis‘us’ expressing the indirect object. The text is the fourth-centry CEPeregrinatio Aetheriae, which is notorious for its conversational andcolloquial style.

(19) (Per Aeth III,6)dederunt nobis presbyteri loci ipsiusgive.PERF.3PL us.DAT priest.NOMPL place.GEN that.GENeulogias, id est de pomis .. .praise.ACCPL that is of fruit.ABLPL‘the priests sang to us the praises of that place, that is of the fruit . ..’

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There are also many other contexts in the language in which de and adwill have independently definable semantic values. As already noted insection 2, an adequate grammar will thus have to capture on the onehand the grammatical and the semantic uses of the same prepositionsand on the other the morphosyntactic equivalence of a bare case formand a prepositional phrase.22 We will develop an LFG account of this insection 5 below. Before that, however, let us briefly review a couple ofother developments in the syntax of prepositions in modern Romance.

3.8. Later Romance developments

3.8.1. As is well known, the eventual result of the breakdown andreplacement of the Latin case system, part of which has been describedin the last section, is the complete loss of morphological case as agrammatical mechanism. As the historical record shows, and as logicwould dictate (Harris 1978), the rise of prepositions precedes the fall ofcase. Just as the fixed order of a noun adjacent to its governing prepositionpermits the case marking to be lost without loss of content, so the fixedorder of subject, verb, and object allows for loss of grammatical casemarking. The detail of these changes is complex and would take us toofar afield. It is sufficient to note here that between the original, grammati-cally autonomous semantic cases and the complete loss of case morphol-ogy is a long-lasting stage in which grammatical case survives beside anoriginally semantic use of prepositions, while the latter in turn becomegrammaticalized for the expression of non–core arguments as case iseliminated from the system.23

3.8.2. Just as some prepositions pass from semantic to syntactic func-tions so a wide range of new prepositions are coined from many differentsources (cf. Vincent 1997a, 1997b; Longobardi 1995). Thus,

(20) Ital senza ‘without’ < Lat absentia(m) ‘absence’Fren chez ‘with, at the house of, in’ < Lat casa(m) ‘house’Span bajo ‘underneath’ < Lat bassu(m) ‘low’

The mechanisms here are various, depending on the verbal, nominal, oradjectival origin of the prepositions in question, but the changes arefacilitated by the fact that the outcome is a class of items, namelyprepositions, that already exist in the language. The grammaticalizationpatterns here therefore do not create a new category, as is often the caseelsewhere, but expand and take on the properties of an already existingclass (Vincent 1995).


3.8.3. One particularly interesting development in this latter connectionis the emergence of prepositions whose etymology requires us to assume acombination of prepositions. Thus, for instance, Italian dopo ‘after’ can beshown to be the fusion of po<Lat post ‘after’ prefixed by de, the genitive-marking preposition whose origin we reviewed in section 3.7. SimilarlyFrench avant ‘before’ is from Latin ab ‘from’+ante ‘before’. The mostlikely origin of such preposition+preposition sequences is from a stage inwhich a preposition could take another PP as complement (Vincent 1997a:212–213). Thus the etymology of Italian dopo cena ‘after dinner’ would be[de [ post cenam]], literally ‘from after dinner’. This is important evidencefor another piece in our puzzle. Classical Latin did not in general allow PPsto be the complements of other Ps,24 a pattern with which we are of coursevery familiar in English (Jackendoff 1973), and we can take their historicalemergence in this function to be yet another sign of the increasing internalstructural complexity of the category PP. It is perhaps not surprising thatthe most common prepositions to take PP complements were the two mostgrammatical ones de and ad, though others are found: French avant‘before’<ab+ante, It innanzi ‘before’<in+ante.

3.9. The changes summed up

At this point it will be useful to summarize the sequence of changes thatwe have argued for in the preceding sections. There was undoubtedly aconsiderable degree of overlap in the instantiation of these changes(fuelled by the kinds of sociolinguistic factors discussed in Molinelli 1996,1998), but by separating them out into discrete stages here we can betterhighlight the logical connections:

Stage I. Adverbial particles exist that do not have grammaticallydetermined arguments and can occur in a variety of clausal positions.

Stage II. One particular usage of these particles causes them to precedeand modify semantically independent local case forms of nouns. Another(independent) usage has them in stressed clause-initial position wherethey may host second-position clitic pronouns. (Failing either of theseoptions, the particles default to an unstressed preverbal position fromwhich they become attached to the verb to create a new new class ofprefixed verbs.)

Stage III. Both the patterns identified in stage II admit of a reanalysis inwhich the nominal or pronominal element may be interpreted as an

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argument of the adverbial particle, thereby converting the particle into apreposition of which the case form is now a dependent, and creating thecategory complement of P. This, as Lehmann (1995: 88) emphasizes, alsoinvolves the syntacticization of the implicit semantic argument that was thepoint of reference for the interpretation of the earlier adverbial meaning.

Stage IV. The prepositional phrases thus created come in due course tobe themselves subject to modification by items such as usque, longe, totum.

Stave V. Such secondary modifiers come to occupy a fixed pre-preposi-tional slot and thus to create a category Spec(ifier) of PP.

Stave VI. As prepositional syntax extends its range and case formsrecede, both changes that are implemented over a number of centuries,two further changes occur:

i. PPs come to be complements of P;ii. many new prepositions are created through the grammaticalization

of a wide range of other categories.

Stage VII. Structures of the form [P [P NP]] that emerge in stage VI(i) are reanalyzed as [P-P [NP]] and eventually the compound preposi-tions so formed relexicalize as single Ps.

Stage VIII. The culmination of all these stages, which are cruciallynot only logically but also chronologically distinct, consists in therigid, hierarchical, X-bar style, case-free PPs of the modern Romancelanguages.

What this sequence of events indicates is that, although the modernsituation may be well described by X-bar theory, the stages that lead upto it do not necessarily require the postulation of the full projection ofP at the moment the category P comes to exist. In the remainder of thispaper we will try to draw out the theoretical consequences, in both thediachronic and the synchronic arenas, of such a state of affairs.

4. Grammaticalization and grammatical theory

The case history (in both senses!) we have just sketched is exactly thekind of evidence that has been at the heart of the recent revival of interestin grammaticalization (cf. Cuzzolin 1995). Items that in origin had inde-pendent lexical content gradually extend their semantic range and at thesame time acquire a fixed subcategorization (Vincent 1980: 56–57). This


is perhaps most dramatically evident with the pan-Romance prepositionde/di, which once had a sense of ‘down, away from’ (cf. Latin de-scendo‘I come down’, de-sum ‘I am absent’) but now marks the purely grammati-cal relation of one noun on another (la voiture de Paul ‘Paul’s car’, lachute du gouvernement ‘the fall of the government’) or of one verb onanother (il a decide de s’en aller ‘he decided to leave’).

What the grammaticalization approach does not have — and indeedwhat some if not all proponents of grammaticalization would argueagainst in principle — is a theory whereby one can represent and computegrammatical structure. Thus, although they make fundamental use of theconcept of ‘‘reanalysis,’’ as indeed all theories of syntactic change cannotfail to do (Harris and Campbell 1995: chapter 4, though cf. nowHaspelmath 1998), they have no more than the traditional armory ofinformal and intuitive grammatical categories with which to define theinput to and output from diachronic reanalyses. The weakness of thisposition is perhaps not so obvious when the matter under discussion issemantic bleaching and the concomitant extension of the class of NPsassociated with a given predicate. However, when we have a discrete shiftfrom absence to presence of an argument, which is the key factor in thebirth of a class of prepositions, then the inability to fall back on a theoryof argument structure constitutes a serious difficulty.25

In this respect, the acquisition of argument structure, which is, as wehave seen, inherent in the process of preposition formation, is not simplythe opposite of the loss of argument structure, which is commonly, andreasonably, held to characterize auxiliarization (Roberts 1985, 1993).More precisely, Roberts (1985) argues that the properties of ModernEnglish modals derive from the fact that they no longer assign theta roleswhen compared to their etymological sources. Loss of theta structure isa clear formal analogue to the usual accounts of grammaticalization asinvolving ‘‘semantic bleaching.’’ By the same logic one might expectacquisition of theta structure to be a kind of ‘‘degrammaticalization’’ (onwhich see Ramat 1992), yet the intuitive parallels break down. Rather,the fact of adverbs becoming prepositions, as already noted, is usuallythought of as a kind of grammaticalization (Cuzzolin 1995) for theobvious reason that such items start to contract more than semanticrelations of modification within the clauses to which they belong. Whatthen is it precisely that unites the loss of argument structure in the caseof the emergence of English modals and the acquisition of argumentstructure in the items studied here, and makes both instances of grammati-calization? The answer is to be sought in the fact that individual lexicalitems have (morpho)syntactic consequences to the extent that they deter-mine or select properties of other items with which they combine. Any

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verb inherently has such an effect through its subcategorization frame.As the semantic content of this frame is reduced, so that, say, an itemselects a subject without selecting a thematic role to associate with thesubject, we may legitimately talk of grammaticalization (or in Lehmann’sperhaps more perspicacious term ‘‘syntacticization’’). By the same token,an adverb has no inherent selection properties, and is thus a more purelylexical item with greater selectional autonomy. Adding it or removing itfrom a sentence may have semantic consequences but will not normallyhave syntactic reverberations. The acquisition of a subcategorizationframe, even a semantically determined one, by which an adverb shifts toprepositional status, is thus a step in the direction of greater grammaticalinteraction with other items in the clause, and thus of grammaticalizationin the intended sense. It is then reasonable to say that, as a prepositionmoves from having its own semantic content to marking a purely syntacticrelation such as demoted subject in a passive or causative construction,it acquires an even greater degree of grammaticalization.

It must be emphasized, however, that each such change is a separatestep, which may or may not take place according to the pressures thatare operative in the language and at the historical moment in question.There is an apparent directionality because of an overriding constraintthat an item cannot acquire increased semantic content, or reacquire lostsemantic content, without being relexicalized. This in turn follows becauseof interaction with other items. If, for instance, a verb ceases to determinethe semantic role of its own subject — as happened in the evolution ofraising verbs like seem and tend (Barron 1997) — then that value will besupplied by the argument of another verb. Since there is no reason forone verb, having once acquired the privilege of assigning an argumentvalue to another verb’s empty slot, to give that privilege up, there is nopossibility of the other verb’s reacquiring its earlier semantic potential.If on the other hand we create a new verb, even from a conjunction ora preposition as in the much cited to down a glass of wine or theShakespearian but me no buts, we endow these items as new members ofthe lexical class in question with the properties appropriate to that class.It is unhelpful, and potentially confusing, to call such changes ‘‘degram-maticalizations’’ when what they really involve is (re)lexicalization.26

On this view there may be directionality in grammaticalization (Hopperand Traugott 1993: chapter 5), but there is no teleology (pace Lightfoot1999). The directionality arises from the nature of grammatical systemsand thus from the nature of possible changes once a system is in a givenstate. Whether any further change does or does not take place at a giventime does not, however, depend on what changes have gone before or on aknowledge of what might be the future endpoint of changes developing


out of the current state. Either of these possibilities would indeed beteleological since they would require a given state of a language to beendowed with a knowledge of its own history and/or future.

Another criticism that is frequently levelled at research within theframework of so-called ‘‘grammaticalization theory’’ is its informal nature(cf. most recently Newmeyer 1988: chapter 5). A range of views arepossible here. At one extreme stand those who regard language as thekind of phenomenon that by its very essence lies beyond the reach of theformal, mathematical techniques that characterize the natural sciences.Grammar, on this view is not a computationally fixable system, but a setof emergent patterns that inhere in the cognitive and communicativeneeds of speakers, and thus the whole formalist, and indeed structuralist,enterprise is misconceived (Bybee et al. 1994: 1). Such a position seemsto me to be unduly pessimistic. At the other extreme lie those whoconsider the only acceptable accounts of natural language to be formalones, and what has not been formalized to all intents and purposes doesnot exist. In our present state of knowledge this view errs in the otherdirection and is ungenerous to the many scholars who have contributedgenuine, though unformalized, insights into the workings of naturallanguage and natural languages. To take a parallel from the world ofscience and engineering, there is a whole continuum of stages from havingthe intuition that the laws of physics would permit a vehicle with rotatingblades to fly, through working out in detail the relevant equations anddesigning possible configurations of blades, to developing the right tech-nology and materials to actually build and fly a helicopter. At any pointuntil the last (and maybe even then given the ever present possibility ofrefinement), individuals working on such a project contribute a mix ofmore or less formal(ized) and implemented insights.

Transposed back to linguistics, this view means that we should beprepared to accept insights from any source but that we should not giveup our twentieth-century commitment to aim at formal models of lan-guage structure. Since one of the conclusions that we argue for in thepresent paper is the stepwise acquisition of full configurational structurein the modern Romance languages, we need to show — at least inprinciple — how these changes can be modeled in a framework that doesnot build configurationality into its basic architecture, as the variousversions of Chomskyan syntax (GB, principles and parameters, minimal-ism) all do. This will be the task of the final sections of the paper.

5. Towards a lexical-functional model of change

Canonical X-bar theory can handle most if not all the patterns we havejust observed, but only at the expense of postulating the existence of

1138 N. Vincent

levels of structure prior to the emergence of the forms that would provideevidence for the structure. Thus, since the presence of a categoryP(reposition) in X-bar automatically entails both a complement and aspecifier of P, the slot Spec of P will have to be assumed to exist as soonas the case forms come to be governed by the former independentadverbial particle. Indeed, on the widespread view that such adverbialparticles are simply intransitive prepositions (Jackendoff 1973; Emonds1976: 172ff.), the strongest form of X-bar theory might even be interpretedto include (unrealized) Spec and Comp of P at the Proto-Indo-Europeanstage before case-governing prepositions in the traditional sense haveemerged. Now there is indeed much to be said for the view that assimilatesadverbial particles of this kind to the class of prepositions (cf. alreadyJespersen 1992 [1924]: 87ff. for a similar idea), as long as we are notforced to associate with them unrealized and at some stages unrealizablearguments and modifiers. In other words, a theory is preferable in whichcategories may exist but in which projections of those categories areassociated with them only at a historical stage at which there is overtevidence for such further layers of structure. On this view, and somewhatschematically, we could say that PIE has P, early Latin has P andcomplement of P, and later Latin/Romance has P, complement of P, andspecifier of P. Projection is then historically delayed until triggered bythe changing distributional frequencies of certain items. The accretion ofeach new layer of structure can then be thought as corresponding to, andmaking precise, part of the intuitive idea of increased gramaticalization.

Compare now the usual X-theory treatment of morphological case(cf. Bittner and Hale 1996). On this view, since the Latin ablative, say,corresponds to an English with-phrase, and since the latter is headed bythe preposition with, then for Latin and other such languages a categoryKP (for case phrase) is postulated headed by a case morpheme K, whichwill then contract the same structural relation to its associated nominalas the P does to its nominal.27 (For an instance of this form of argumenta-tion applied in the historical domain, see Weerman 1997.) Putting thislatter idea together with the standard understanding of projection meansthat the postulated functional head K in turn automatically projects Specof KP and complement of K. Once again there is a problem of unwantedstructure. The essential objection to this way of proceeding is that itcreates a ‘‘syntax’’ for the morphological form that is never realized inthe phonology (Borjars et al. 1997; Vincent and Borjars 1996). This‘‘syntactic’’ view of morphology rests on the fallacious representationalassumption that the only way to state morphosyntactic generalizationsis in terms of X-bar trees. What is required rather is a means of represent-ing morphological information on its own terms but ensuring that it can


communicate within the grammar with syntactic information, alsorepresented on its own terms. The way to achieve this is to extract thefunctional equivalences that the two patterns — inflectional case andprepositions — have, and to state this in a single common representation,an f(unctional )-structure. This f-structure can then be mapped onto theindependently available and autonomously structured realizations in mor-phology and syntax. We will flesh out such an account for two types ofsituation, one involving a semantic use of case/prepositions and the othera grammatical use (Vincent and Borjars 1997).

Let us begin with the representation of the content of a semantic casesuch as an original Indo-Eurpean locative must have been ( Kuryłowicz1964: chapter 8). This can be expressed, following Simpson (1991) andAndrews (1995), by interpreting the semantic case as having its ownargument. Intuitively, a locative case marker expresses a predicate oflocation, the argument of which is the (referent of the) noun to whichthe case marker is morphologically attached. Formally, this can be statedas in (21) for the form urbe ‘in/at the city’:

(21) CPRED ‘LOC <(OBJh)>’

OBJh

urb- DIn (21) OBJ

hmeans a theta-object or an object that has an inherent

semantic role, in the present instance locative. In the stage in whichin/endo ‘in, inside’ has not yet become a preposition but is rather amodifier of this locative case, the representation of endo urbe ‘inside thecity’ will be as in (22), where the modifier is modeled as the ADJ(unct)function in LFG. (NB: In what follows I adopt the fiction of representingthe item in/endo in this modifier function by its earlier shape endo, andin its prepositional function by its later shape in. I hope this will clarifythe exposition, though it should be understood that the phonetic evolutionfrom endo> in was independent of and parallel with the grammaticalshift being analyzed here.)

(22) CADJ PRED ‘endo’

PRED ‘LOC <(OBJh)>’

OBJh

urb- DAfter the grammaticalization of the preposition, we will have

(23) CPRED ‘in <(OBJh)>’

OBJh

urb- DA version of this last with its own modifier would be longe in urbe ‘far

1140 N. Vincent

inside the city’ to which we can assign the following representation:

(24) CADJ PRED ‘longe’

PRED ‘in <(OBJh)>’

OBJh

urb- DWhat these representations do not capture is the morphological formsof the nouns in question. We need to ensure that in (21) and (22) theLOC predicate is realized as the locative case, while in (23) and (24) theobject of in is in the ablative case. In order to achieve this we firstconsider how to represent an item that has a grammatical case such asnominative or accusative (see once more Vincent and Borjars 1997 fordiscussion of the two types of case). In such circumstances the case willbe a simple feature of the argument in question but crucially will nothave its own argument structure. Consider the sentence in (25a) and itsassociated representation in (25b):

(25) a. Exercitus urbem defenditarmy.NOMSG city.ACCSG defend.3SG.PRES‘The army defends the city’

b. tNNNNNNNNNv

PRED ‘defendere <(SUBJ), (OBJ)>’

TENSE PRES

SUBJ CPRED exercitu-

CASE NOM

NUM SG DOBJ CPRED urb-

CASE ACC

NUM SG D

uNNNNNNNNNw

The association between the functions subject and object and the casemarkings nominative and accusative will be achieved through lexicalentries for the cases of the following form:

(26) NOM: (SUBJ ()((CASE)=NOM

ACC: (OBJ ()((CASE)=ACC

Such entries contain the IO (inside-out) operator, which is placed to theright of the relevant function. They are to be read as ‘‘the item in question


has nominative/accusative case and contributes the value subject/object tothe larger f-structure to which it belongs’’ (for more details on this so-called‘‘constructive case’’ notation, see Nordlinger 1998: chapter 3). In otherwords, adding for example the feature ACC to a noun triggers a morpholog-ical process that finds the appropriate case form for the lexeme in questionand at the same time says that the item thus formed will count as the objectof the sentence. The complex patterns of morphological realization of thesecase/number forms according to the declensional class of the noun in ques-tion will be the responsibility of a separate morphological component,whose internal structure we will not further articulate here (cf. Blake [119:20–23] for the arguments against mapping function straight into morpho-logical form in a language like Latin). Note in particular that in a systemof this kind there is no need to allocate the subject and object to configura-tionally determined slots in order for them to receive their case marking.The kind of direct function–case mapping exploited in (26) fits very wellwith the fact that the word order in Latin is relatively free, and that thereforeany linear rearrangement of the sentence in (25a) will retain the samef-structure values as long as the case forms are not changed. Conversely, ifthe case forms are changed, for instance by making exercitus ‘army’ accusa-tive and urbs ‘city’ nominative, then the meaning and the f-structure of thesentence change even if word order is held constant.

Let us return now to the question of assigning case forms in the contextof the grammatical change from modifier to preposition itemized in (21)thorough (24) above. At the original stage represented in (21) the locativevalue of the locative case can be expressed as follows:

(27) LOC: (ADJ ()((CASE)=LOCPRED ‘LOC <OBJ

h>’

(27) says that the item in the locative case bears the function of adjunctin its clause. The prepositional case instead requires the following state-ment, which must be construed as part of the lexical entry for in:28

(28) in: PRED ‘in <OBJh>’

OBJh

CASE=ABL

In other words the shift from modifier to preposition involves in/endoacquiring both an OBJ argument in its PRED feature and a case-assigningfeature that determines the morphological shape of that argument.Inspection of the above f-structures reveals that all the necessary equiva-lences and differences are represented. When the original locative caseis serving a semantic function than it is functionally equivalent to a

1142 N. Vincent

preposition, and this is expressed in the similarity of their respective PREDfeatures, viz.

(29) a. loc ‘LOC <OBJh>’ (as in [21] and [22])

b. in ‘in <OBJh>’ (as in [23] and [24])

When the erstwhile modifier acquires prepositional force, then it takes overthe PRED feature and the case is automatically downgraded to grammaticalstatus and is assigned in virtue of the f-structure value of the item to whichit attaches, just as happens for clausal subjects and objects.

Finally in this section we see how an extension of the apparatus justestablished will provide us with a natural account of the equivalencesbetween case forms and PPs reviewed in section 3.6 above. I will simplifythe discussion somewhat by extracting the core propositional structureout of the Plautine examples cited in (17), and repeating it as (30):

(30) a. ea patri nuntiasthat.NEUT.ACCPL father.DATSG tell.PRES.2SG‘you tell those things to your father’

b. ea ad patrem nuntiasthat.NEUT.ACCPL to father.DATSG tell.PRES.2SG‘you tell those things to your father’

We can assume a function–case equivalence for dative inherited fromIndo-European as follows:29

(31) DAT: (IND OBJ ()((CASE)=DAT

This will allow us to state the f-structure of (30a) as

(32) tNNNNNNNNNNNNNv

PRED ‘nuntiare <(SUBJ ), (OBJ ), (IND OBJ)>’

TENSE PRES

SUBJ CPRED ‘addressee’

CASE NOM

NUM SG DOBJ CPRED is

CASE ACC

NUM PL DIND OBJ CPRED patr-

CASE DAT

NUM SG D

uNNNNNNNNNNNNNw


To complete the story we now need it to be possible for the f-structureof ad patrem in (30b) to substitute for and be equivalent to the f-structureof patri in (30a). In other words, we need to treat the PP here not asheaded by P with an independent PRED feature as in our treatment ofin above, but as constituting a periphrastic case form. To achieve this, Iwill exploit the type of analysis developed in Borjars et al. (1997). Thefunction–case statement required is

(33) AD: (( IND OBJ )(P-OBJ CASE)=ACCP

(33) says that ad is a preposition, that it contributes the value for theindirect object function to the larger f-structure of which it is part, thatis, the prepositional phrase, and that the case form of the object withinthat prepositional phrase is accusative. The information in (33) consti-tutes one lexical entry for the preposition ad. There will be a secondentry for ad in its semantically full sense as a marker of the theta rolegoal. This will have the form in (34):

(34) ad PRED ‘ad <OBJh>’

OBJh

CASE=ACC

Now there would be a failure of unification if we were to try to plug inthe preposition ad with the lexical entry in (34) in a context where anindirect object was required. Thus the choice between which entry for adto use in a given sentence is a consequence of the f-structure of thatsentence. Note too that even if ad loses its PRED feature it does not giveup its syntactic subcategorization, which is still accusative, and hence thecorrect case is assigned to patrem. An exactly parallel account can bedeveloped for the grammaticalization of de ‘down, about’ into the markerof nominal dependent, first in competition with and finally as a replace-ment for genitive case. The consistent generalization across both thediachronic scenarios discussed in this paper and those in Borjars et al.(1997) is that grammaticalization can be neatly modeled in LFG termsas loss of the PRED feature, with the remainder of the changes followingfrom the independently required architecture of the model.

6. Toward an optimality-theory account of syntactic change

In the previous section I have sought to show that a parallel corre-spondence model such as LFG provides a more natural account of thedata outlined in section 3. In recent work, Bresnan (forthcoming a,

1144 N. Vincent

forthcoming b, forthcoming c) has argued further that the LFG framework is best construed in optimality-theory terms. On this view, therelation between f-structure and c-structure is determined by the inter-action of rerankable constraints rather than in absolute terms. Althoughwe will not work out a full account here, three observations indicate theattractiveness of the OT approach also in the present instance.

The first concerns the constraint proposed in Bresnan (forthcoming a)under the name of the principle of economy of expression:

(35) DON’T PROJECT: All non-preterminal c-structure nodes areoptional and not used unless required by independent principles

As she notes, this constraint ‘‘privileges lexical over phrasal expressionwherever possible.’’ We should note too that for these purposes ‘‘lexical’’includes fully inflected items according to the principle of lexical integrity.The consequence of this principle applied to a case form of a languagelike Latin or Sanskrit (and hence, for the purposes of the present argu-ment, to the relevant reconstructible stage of the parent language) is thatunless other factors intervene, such as the requirements of other items inthe f-structure (or members of the ‘‘numeration’’ in minimalist terms),no further structure is required. In particular, there are no empty Ds orPs required. Nor, even if a lexical category node is required, will it benecessary to project higher-level structure from that node. In the contextof the data studied here, this means that at the earliest Indo-Europeanstage the morphologically complete lexical entries will not need to belicensed by empty prepositions or the like. They will simply express thecategories of f-structure directly. As each successive historical reanalysistakes place, it will introduce new levels of structure via a reranking ofDON’T PROJECT vis-a-vis the endocentricity constraints that ensureovert expression of grammatical content.

The second observation that leads naturally in the OT direction con-cerns the notation of morphosyntactic competition (Bresnan forthcomingb, forthcoming c). In these papers Bresnan develops the idea that thereis a hierarchical ranking of different forms of expression for a givengrammatical content. Just as she proposes a scale for the expression ofpronominal content ranging from zero to full syntactically independentpronouns, we can think of a similar scale for the expression of case andprepositional type meanings. On the not-unreasonable assumption thatindependent prepositions are higher on such a hierarchy than bound casemorphology, just as pronouns are higher than agreement morphology,we should expect the development of the former to take precedence overthe historically inherited latter. It is difficult to be more precise at thispoint in the research since a full case–preposition scale remains to be


worked out. However, for a more detailed investigation of the logic ofthis type of argumentation in a diachronic projection of Bresnan’spronoun hypothesis, see Vincent (forthcoming).

Third, recall the discussion of the relative ordering of the prepositionand the question word in examples such as quem ad modum, etc. Thisrequires, as indeed Broadwell (1999) proposes for the San DominicioZapotec data cited in (11), that the constraint forcing the interrogativeto align with the left edge of the clause should outrank the constraintthat the head of the constituent occur on the left edge. Subsequentdevelopments, in which this order is lost, suggest the reranking of theseconstraints. Note further that the increased prominence of the constraintthat makes the preposition leftmost will block the kind of fronting thatwe saw in the magna cum laude construction, and indeed neitherpossibility has survived into the modern Romance languages.

7. Conclusion

To conclude, then, our aim in the present study has been to trace thehistorical evolution of Romance prepositions from their earliest originsin Indo-European sentence-level particles and to show how the variousingredients of a full-fledged category of prepositional phrase haveemerged at different stages over a long historical timespan. We haveinterpreted this evidence as showing not that there is a future-orientedteleological pattern to change, but rather that a sequence of changes maybe pushed from behind, each successive stage facilitating the next one.We have also suggested that this particular example favors an architectureof grammar in which the system of grammatical relations is separatedfrom the expression of such relations, and we have finally hinted that thewhole model of grammar may benefit from being interpreted in optimal-ity-theory terms rather than in the more conventional absolutist sense.

Received 30 June 1998 University of ManchesterRevised version received12 October 1999

Notes

* Parts of the material in this paper were presented at a workshop on grammaticalizationheld during LFG97 at UCSD in June, 1997, and at a workshop on functional categoriesand syntactic change held during ICHL13 at Dusseldorf in August, 1997. I am gratefulto those who raised questions on those occasions, and to the organizers, respectively

1146 N. Vincent

Farrell Ackerman and Ans van Kemenade for inviting me to participate. I am gratefulto Ans, ‘‘JC’’ Smith, Joan Bresnan, and Kersti Borjars, who read and commented onearly drafts, and particularly to Ans again for her further suggestions in the light of thereferees’ comments. My thanks too to Andrew Spencer for his comments and notes onthe development of prepositions in Slavic and Greek, and to Anna Morpurgo Davies,Jim Adams, and David Langslow for conversations on Indo-European and Latin. Iwould also like to thank the referees — one of whom subsequently revealed himself tobe Christian Lehmann — for their helpful comments. The work reported here is partof a larger project funded through a Research Readership from the British Academy,whose support is gratefully acknowledged.

Correspondence address: Department of Linguistics, University of Manchester,Manchester M13 9PL, UK. E-mail: [email protected].

1. In this sense LFG enshrines the syntactic equivalent of what Aronoff (1994: 8ff.) callsthe ‘‘separationist hypothesis’’ in morphology. For an elaboration of the latter fromthe perspective of LFG, see Borjars et al. (1997) and Vincent and Borjars (1996).

2. On a terminological note, I will use constituency to mean the hierarchical, configura-tional pattern familiar from X-bar theory. C-structure is the representation withinLFG that encodes the same information. The difference is that within LFG c-structuremay also be ‘‘flat’’ and/or ‘‘morphological’’ according to the dictates of the languageunder analysis, whereas X-bar theory is standardly conceived as a universal configura-tional template to which all morphosyntactic structures in all languages must conform.

3. One referee points out that the accusative in many Indo-European languages — andplausibly therefore also in the parent language — also had an adverbial function. Thisis of course true, but a detailed discussion would take us too far from the main track ofthe argument. Suffice it to say that I would envisage an analysis in terms of default casealong the lines of Smith (1996), a solution that he in turn attributes to Gaedicke(1880). The fact remains that case constructions just as much as prepositional onesrequire a distinction between grammatical and concrete uses, and this argues againsttreating grammatical uses of prepositions as case markers.

4. Jackendoff ’s system is taken over under the feature names [± predicative] and[± transitive] in Bresnan (forthcoming d).

5. Horrocks (1997) argues for the origins of Indo-European grammatical case in anearlier system of semantic relations (cf. already Meillet 1937: 357–359). Even if this(controversial ) view is accepted, however, the fact remains that the acquisition of case-marked dependents by prepositions is a much later development within the Indo-European family. This incontrovertible time lapse between the development of verbaland prepositional case assignment suffices for the purposes of our present argument.

6. It is the absence of this construction in later Latin that argues against an analysis whereendo is treated as a preposition with a pro object. It is not that Latin did not have objectpro; it did but never with prepositions (van der Wurff 1993; Luraghi 1997; Pieroni1999), hence it is unlikely that an early example such as this is to be understood inthis way.

7. One of my referees called me to order on the question of terminology here, so a wordof clarification is perhaps useful. ‘‘Particle’’ is a conventional label for a very hetero-geneous class of elements whose one common property is that they do not inflect andthus belong to a distinct class from substantives (nouns, adjectives) on the one handand verbs on the other. Many of these particles express meanings that modify thesentence as a whole so that in terms of function they may fairly be described, withoutstretching traditional terminology, as adverbs. There is no contradiction therefore in


describing them, when necessary, as ‘‘adverbial particles,’’ thereby uniting form andfunction in a single composite label.

8. As is often noted, the traditional label is something of a misnomer since it suggests adivision of something that was formerly a unit, whereas at the point at which ‘‘tmesis’’abounds it is precisely because the full effects of so-called ‘‘univerbation’’ have not yetset in.

9. For extensive discussion of these matters, and for opposing views as to whether theprincipal conditioning factors are prosodic or syntactic, see the exchange between Hale(1996) and Hock (1996). Neither scholar, however, challenges the traditional view thatseparated preverbs in Sanskrit are stressed. This prosodic property, which is clearlyderived from an Indo-European stage at which the items in question were not yetpreverbs but independent clausal elements, is important for our discussion below of theordering facts in early Latin.

10. Unstressed main verbs migrate to second position, as already noted by Wackernagel:cf. Anderson (1993).

11. This conclusion, which is no more than what is standardly agreed by all the manualsand commentators since the last century, is not threatened by evidence that there wereother items that were already preverbs (and perhaps, though this is less clear, adposi-tions) in the Indo-European parent language (Pinault 1995). Nor are the objections ofPinkster (1972: chapter 9.2) especially persuasive. He is certainly right that throughoutattested Latin there is a clear relation of government between preposition and case, butexamples such as those in (4) show us the residue of an earlier stage in which no suchrelation was required. The existence of such a stage is amply confirmed by the sisterlanguages whose attestation is more ancient. The important point for our purposes isthat the items that make up the bulk of the prepositions and preverbs in the daughterlanguages display signs of syntactic independence in texts such as those cited here forLatin and Homeric Greek (8th cent BCE) and Vedic and Hittite (2nd millenium BCE).Even the earliest of these is two or more millennia later than the latest datings for I-Eunity. For a similar interpretation of these facts, see also the discussion in Lehmann(1995: chapter 3.4.1.4).

12. Note that this origin explains the absence of prepositions governing the dative case,which did not have local values in the proto-language. Where in a modern language wefind a prepositional dative — e.g. Germanic, Greek — this is due to a later syncretismof the original dative with one or more of the local cases (Vincent 1997c).

13. As Christian Lehmann reminds me, if pre-Latin adpositions had by contrast beendenominal and not deadverbial, they would in all probability have been postpositions,as is the case with the much later items causa ‘because of ’ (<causa ‘reason’), gratia ‘onaccount of ’ (<gratia ‘favor’).

14. A referee queries the relevance of the Oscan data here. The point is simply that from avery similar, perhaps even identical, starting point that language developed a patternthat Joseph argues was structurally impossible for Latin. Since in other morphologicalrespects the languages have much in common, the outcome in Oscan suggests thatJoseph was looking in the wrong place to find an answer for the Latin facts. Moreover,although it is true, as the same referee notes, that items such as -que had always beenenclitic and therefore had a different status from particles in the ancestor language, thefact remains that they could be attached after the inflection, once again challenging theclaim that the morphological inflection comes last in the word.

15. A clue to the different accentual status of the separated and unseparated preverb inLatin is found in the vowel alternations in sub placo vs supplico, ob sacro vs obsecro. Inthe separated form there is a stress on each part and hence the verb stem has the full

1148 N. Vincent

vowel a. However, the preverb+verb cluster receives a single word stress and hencethe stem vowel reduces: cf. cano ‘I sing’, tango ‘I touch’ beside cecini ‘I sang’, tetigi ‘Itouched’ with stress on the reduplicated perfective prefix. Note that the stress here ison the Latin initial syllable as a consequence of the normal functioning of the Latinword-stress rule; it is purely coincidental that the stressed portion of the wordcorresponds to the preverb in supplico and obsecro.

16. The one branch where postpositions are undeniable is Hittite, but these are an internaldevelopment within that language, as is shown by the fact that the evidence for post-positions is stronger in Middle Hittite than in Old Hittite (cf. Starke 1977). Here too,as Christian Lehmann notes, the source of the postpositions lies in a class of originaladverbs. I am grateful to Anna Morpurgo Davies for bringing the Hittite facts to myattention and for explaining their significance in the broader context of reconstructingthe syntax of I-E preverbs.

17. Similar emphasis must be attributed to the fronted numeral in duabus de causis ‘for tworeasons’ (Caes BG 6.9). One referee accuses me of circularity at this point: I claim thefronted adjective is emphatic; how do I know it’s emphatic? because it’s fronted! It istrue that it is often a matter of choice whether to read a passage as emphatic, and inthe absence of native speakers we cannot check our semantic intuitions. In addition,with some of these adjectives the pattern must have become virtually fixed as in thesumma cum laude formula applied to university degrees in many countries. Nonetheless,the fact that not all adjectives freely occur in this position outside poetry (wheremetrical and other considerations can play a decisive role), and that the class ofadjectives that are found here naturally lend themselves to a contrastive or intensifyingreading suggests that a particular pragmatic effect of highlighting or emphasis isintended. The effect is similar to the fronting of a focused element in a clause, but it isimportant to note that this is a separate constituent-internal pattern. Displacement ofitems over a longer distance — what is traditionally called hyperbaton — is much rarer(cf. also note 17).

18. Though compare Nocentini (1992: 236) for the claim that this pattern is not to beattributed to the Wackernagel effect.

19. It remains true that Latin had fairly extensive patterns of topicalization or scramblingin which an element could ‘‘move’’ to the front of its clause and some distance from itscoconstituents (cf. [9b]). It also seems likely that this was characteristic of all styles ofthe language since it leads in due course to the new patterns attested in Romance(cf. Vincent 1998 for some discussion). I will assume however that these patterns are tobe handled independently, an assumption supported by the fact that the grammaticaldistance involved and the classes of categories affected are quite different.

20. The only exceptions here are the use of usque with certain locational nouns where itcan modify the bare directional accusative: terminos usque Libyae ‘to the borders ofLibya’ (Just 1,1,5). This is of course a parallel with the type of case-modificationalstructure out of which prepositions emerged in the first place (cf. section 3.2). Bycontrast, usque is not found with nontemporal and nonspatial prepositions(cf. Rooryck 1996: 226 on the distribution of right in English).

21. I am grateful to David Langslow for pointing out to me the significance of theseexamples.

22. There is a long tradition in Latin grammar of seeking to show that case forms such asdative and genitive are semantically, and hence distributionally, distinct from PPs withad and de respectively (cf. most recently Pinkster 1990). While there are undoubtedlysome tendencies here, the material collected by Molinelli amply demonstrates thepossibility of genuine morphosyntactic and semantic equivalence of a PP and a case


form. It is this circumstance that motivates the theoretical discussion in the concludingsection of the present paper.

23. As I was revising the text of this article, I came upon Rosen (1999), which containsuseful discussion of the historical profile of prepositional constructions replacing case-based ones with many further examples (cf. especially 1999: 137–149).

24. Attested examples such as de in equis, lit. ‘about on horses’ are different in that herein equis is a metonymic expression meaning ‘those on horseback, i.e. cavalry’.

25. Note that this is not intended as a plea for a particular theory of argument structure;there are many available in the current literature and the debates about which to choosewould take us too far afield. The point is simply that the kind of change we arediscussing here is hard to conceive of in the absence of some kind of explicit theoreticalcharacterization of grammatical structure.

26. On the whole question of degrammaticalization, see now van der Auwera (1999). Foran account of why grammaticalization cannot be reversed, see Haspelmath (this issue).

27. Joan Bresnan reminds me that Emonds (1985: 224) had already proposed a variant ofthis analysis according to which a bare case form is treated as a structural PP headedby an empty preposition.

28. I ignore here the additional complexities of the alternation between ablative andaccusative after certain prepositions in Latin. For discussion see Vincent (1997c) andVincent and Borjars (1997).

29. In what follows I have departed from LFG orthodoxy by introducing a function INDOBJ. I do so partly to clarify the exposition for nonspecialist readers but also becausethe Latin situation does not readily lend itself to a treatment in terms of the LFGdistinction between an OBJ function and an OBJ-theta function. The function requiredhere is equivalent to what in relational grammar is labelled ‘‘3.’’

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