LINGUIST List 9.1223

Sat Sep 5 1998

Sum: Nominative Objects of Adpositions

Editor for this issue: Martin Jacobsen <martylinguistlist.org>

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1. lnarl, Nominative Objects of Adpositions

Quite some time ago I submitted a query about nominative objects of
adpositions, asking whether anyone knew of instances of this in
addition to the cases I was already aware of. I am very grateful to
those who provided me with information on this, and I apologize for
the very long delay in posting this summary:

bentle16pilot.msu.edu (Mayrene E. Bentley)
ewb2cornell.edu (Wayles Brown)
collins.232osu.edu (Daniel E. Collins)
drudeGoeldi.museu-goeldi.br (Sebastian Drude)
jfidelsiu.buap.mx (James L. Fidelholtz)
kegsocrates.berkeley.edu (Keith Goeringer)
mattjugesocrates.berkeley.edu (Matt L. Juge)
vincenzi75hotmail.com (Joseph K. Laubach II)

The examples that were pointed out to me include the following:

Two Albanian prepositions, nga 'from' and te(k) 'to', take nominative
objects.

In substandard Brazilian Portuguese some prepositions take nominative
pronouns, rather than the expected obliques.

In Russian za and v can take the nominative in some constructions,
although it is not clear whether they both are acting as prepositions
in such circumstances.

Nominative objects appear with the Spanish prepositions entre
'between' (when the objects are conjoined NPs) and segun 'according
to'. The same sort of thing happens in Catalan.

The above facts have been used in my first paper on this subject,
which was delivered at the conference of the Australian Linguistics
Society in July of this year, and which has now been web-published in
the proceedings for that conference. I again thank all of those who
shared data with me.

Alan Libert
Dept. of Linguistics
University of Newcastle