On Italian spatial prepositions and measure phrases: reconciling the data with theoretical accounts

Abstract

Abstract The goal of this article is to offer new empirical evidence regarding the grammatical and semantic properties of Italian spatial prepositions, and to provide a theoretical account based on this evidence. We show that Italian has four grammatical types of prepositions (simple, complex, contracted and uncontracted), and three semantic types (geometric, projective and region prepositions). By studying the syntactic distribution of prepositions and the phrases they form with measure phrases (e.g., dieci metri ‘ten meters’) we argue that a non-isomorphic (i.e., not one-to-one) relation between grammatical and semantic type emerges. Region and geometric prepositions form phrases that block the presence of measure phrases (e.g., #dieci metri a fianco del muro ‘ten meters beside the wall’), whereas projective prepositions license them (e.g., dieci metri dietro al muro ‘ten meters behind the wall’). We show that previous accounts postulate a type of symmetry that leads to problematic predictions regarding these patterns. We then propose an alternative account based on the Lexical Syntax framework that models the data via a feature-matching mechanism.