Date and time: Tuesday, 14:15-16:00 Venue:B1003 Contact person: Peter Svenonius

Moving Right Along Web Site


This project (part of the Moving Right Along project) studies the syntax of prepositions and postpositions focusing on how they express motion (as in Mary jumped into the boat) and location (cf. Mary jumped around in the boat). There is rich cross-linguistic variation to be seen in this study; in Germanic alone, for this one example type, we see German and Icelandic with a dative-accusative alternation, Swedish and Norwegian with an intonational contrast, Dutch and Afrikaans with a word-order difference, English with the difference between in and into, not to mention the Scandinavian alternation inn – inne, all corresponding to the difference between direction and location.

Questions to be addressed by the researchers working on this project involve the expression of tense and case assignment, as well as the question of whether prepositions and postpositions are fundamentally the same, or not.

The data collection for this project begins with contributions from the Tromsø environment, where we have linguists who are native speakers of many Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, plus Northern Sámi, Finnish, Kitharaka (Bantu), Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Farsi, as well as linguists who do research on Scottish Gaelic, Bengali, Austronesian, and other languages. In the coming year, we’ll be using these data to develop hypotheses about the fine structure of prepositional phrases, and connecting our work to theoretical developments emerging from some of CASTL’s other syntax teams.

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