engleski

Contrastive study of governed prepositions in Croatian, English and French

Governed prepositions are defined as prepositions in the relation of strong government with another lexical unit in a syntactic phrase, e.g. a verb (believe in, rely on) (Rauh 1993, Hoffmann 2007, Gaszewski 2012). The relation of strong government makes prepositions obligatory complements of verbs, and entails a semantic difference between verb senses with or without a preposition (Eng. believe someone – believe in someone, Cro. držati (što u ruci) ‘hold (something in hand)’ – držati do ‘appreciate ; lit. hold to’, Fr. mettre ‘put (something somewhere)’ – mettre sous ‘to hide’). It also entails a change in the meaning of a preposition and results in its extension from the basic spatial meaning, e.g. be in the box – believe in someone. Governed prepositions have been assigned an intermediary status in terms of the lexical and functional properties of prepositions as a word class, falling in between the basic spatial and other adverbial uses on the one hand, as well as particle uses in phrasal verbs on the other (Rauh 1993). It is therefore the aim of this study to examine the properties of governed prepositions in three structurally different languages - Croatian, English and French. The three languages differ greatly with respect to some syntactic – semantic properties relevant for the role of prepositions in the language system – a) the presence / absence of phrasal verbs, b) a rich / small verb prefix inventory and c) overt / covert case marking. However, there seem to be important similarities in the choices of prepositions which appear in the governed position (e.g. Engl. in, on, at, Cro. u ‘in’, na ‘on, at’, Fr. en ‘in’, dans ‘on, in’) and the syntactic-semantic processes which underlie the meaning extension of particular prepositions, namely idiomatization and gramamaticalization. Based on the extensive corpus study of all three languages we therefore extract verb – preposition constructions in the three languages where the relation of verb and preposition is determined by strong government, and compare and contrast their language specific properties as well as general tendencies in the syntactic-semantic properties of prepositions.

prepositions; government; Croatian; English; French

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