Abstract for Arhonto Terzi's talk

On locative prepositions
Arhonto Terzi (Patras)
March 24, 2005 (Thursday)
4:15 PM - ; Room 6417, the CUNY Graduate Center

This work contributes to the study of Locative P(repositions) crosslinguistically by focusing on the behavior of Greek locative Ps.

We point out similarities in the syntax locatives when construed with genitive clitics and the syntax of the double object construction - which we take as evidence that locatives participate in a possession relation with the clitic. We also discover similarities in the distribution of locatives and adjectives - which we consider to shed light to the nominal flavor of locatives and, most crucially, to argue that Greek locatives modify an empty noun, Place, in a (nominal) possession structure. If we are on the right track, then Greek locative Ps differ significantly from locative Ps of languages like the Germanic, in which they have been considered to head PPLoc and are more similar to English here and there.

Finally, we investigate the behavior of the light Ps with which locative Ps are construed in Complex Preposition structures and discover that they are not always ?elight?f. We demonstrate that when the light P is specified for a feature, such as [distance] or [direction/source], the corresponding clitic structure is not available, a finding which potentially suggests that the two structures in which Greek locatives participate are transformationally related