Prepositions and particles: Place and path in English, German, and Dutch

Germanic languages heavily rely on prepositions and particles (‘Ps’) for describing places and paths. This category P might be considered as a small class of minor function words, but this chapter demonstrates the richness and variety of this category on the basis of Dutch, English, and German data, focusing on two of their aspects that have not received much attention in the literature: transitivity and complexity. Given that Ps are always based on a spatial relation (between a figure and a ground), it is surprising to see that they can often be used, under specific semantic conditions, witho... Mehr ...