On the syntax and semantics of Italian spatial Ps

Abstract

This paper offers a unified approach to Italian spatial prepositions, such as di fronte a ‘in front of’, verso ‘towards’, in ‘in’, dietro a ‘behind’, and nel mezzo di ‘in the middle of’. Three assumptions play a key role. First, Italian spatial prepositions can differ sensibly in their morphological structure, but share the same syntactic properties. Second, their sentential distribution is in part context-sensitive, thus based on the categories with which they combine. Third, their semantic contribution is “layered”, in the sense that it includes the meaning dimensions of both aspectual boundedness and specificity. The main result is a generalised theory on the structure and semantic interpretation of these prepositions.