Preposition Assignment in English
Julia A. Jolly
University of California, Davis- Introduction
Traditional analyses of prepositional functions have differentiated two
operative classes: (1) semantically relational —predicative — prepositions,
functionally similar to adverbial phrases,which convey circumstantial infor
mation about an action, object or process, e.g., before, after, under; and (2)
syntactically relational — non-predicative — prepositions, serving a case-
marking function within the clause, e.g., to, from, with. Diachronie
development of prepositions in English, from relations of place to relations
of time to purely grammatical relations, has been characterized by overlap
ping functions since the Old English period. Synchronic descriptions of pre
positional roles are similarly complicated by multiple, merging functions. A
split-function analysis is constrained by the necessity of separating the two
functional classes and specifying multiple entries of a given preposition in
the lexicon. Possible similarities in semantic structure between items in the
two classes are not revealed.
A more interesting and systematic analysis of English would be one in
which prepositions did not have to be idiosyncratically specified with each
verbal lexical entry but rather would be predicted by some general princi
ples related to the semantics of verbs and the assignment of arguments to
morphosyntactic positions within the clause. The purpose of this study (see
Jolly 1986) is to provide a provisional framework for unifying the tradi
tional bisection of prepositional analysis by specifying both predicative and
non-predicative prepositional functions within one system. Ideally, the
analysis will specify one logical structure (hereafter LS), encompassing, for
example, functions of predicative from and non-predicative, case-marking