Prepositional phrases and argument structure

This paper discusses prepositional phrases (PPs) in relation to the complex distinction between arguments and adjuncts. It first considers the different syntactic properties and treatments of arguments and adjuncts in formal and typological approaches and then illustrates several semantic proposals which identify an intermediate category to which PPs might belong. This category is called an ‘argument-adjunct’ in VAN VALIN & LAPOLLA (1997), ‘subcategorized adjunct’ in DOWTY (2003) and ‘inner and outer margin’ in PRANDI (2004, 2013, 2015). We then examine locative PPs taken from a corpus of spoken Italian in order to verify on the basis of actual language use how relevant the theoretical proposals are when applied to real data. Analysis confirms that the distinction between three types of PPs, arguments, adjuncts and argument-adjuncts, is semantically valid even when we take into account just one class of PPs. However, if the syntax-prosody-pragmatics interface is considered, it is found out that the prosodic and pragmatic correlates of our PPs do not distinguish arguments from adjuncts and argument- adjuncts; rather they distinguish both prosodically and pragmatically salient information from non- salient information on the basis of the linear precedence of the former over the latter.