Verbs (V), nouns (N), adjectives (A) and prepositions (P) constitute the four major word classes. The Syntax of Dutch is organized around these so-called lexical heads; the remaining word classes, the so-called functional heads (like complementizers and determiners), are discussed in relation to these lexical heads. The fourth part of the Syntax of Dutch deals with adpositions and their projections, i.e. adpositional phrases (PPs), and is organized as follows.

The general introduction in Chapter 32 provides a survey of the most distinctive syntactic, semantic, and morphological characteristics of adpositions, and also discusses ways of classifying the adpositions. For example, Section 32.2 syntactically divides the category of adpositions into the four main types in (1) on the basis of their position with respect to their complement.

Section 32.3 provides a semantic classification into the three main groups in (2), which can be further divided into several subclasses. Although other semantic classifications are conceivable, this will provide us with sufficient background information for our syntactic description of the adjectives in the later chapters.

Like the other major categories, adpositions can project. They can select complements, which are usually nominal in nature, such as het kantoor in (3a), and they can be modified, as in (3b). This will be discussed in Chapter 33 and Chapter 34, respectively.

Chapter 35 takes a closer look at the syntactic uses of the adpositional phrases, i.e. their use as arguments, predicates, attributive modifiers, and in various adverbial functions. Some illustrations are given in (4).

Chapter 36 concludes with a discussion of the formation of pronominal PPs, such as er opon it, where the complement of a preposition appears as a so-called R-word, like daar/erthere and hierhere. We will see that the R-word can sometimes be separated from the preposition by leftward movement, as in (5a), and we will examine the syntactic restrictions on this split.

This chapter will be supplemented with a discussion of R-words of the kind in (6), although strictly speaking this goes beyond the main topic of this part.

This also holds for the complex issue of co-occurrence and conflation of the different types of R-words. For instance, in addition to example (7a) we find the examples in (7b-d), where er performs more than one syntactic function simultaneously.

We like to thank Barbiers (2005) for his review of an earlier interim report of this part of SoD, which led to important clarifications in Sections 33.4 and 35.1. We would also like to conclude this introduction with expressing our gratitude to Maaike Beliën (2014) for her review of the first book version of this part on adpositional phrases: we benefited from some of her critical comments in preparing the revision of the present chapter. However, because auxiliary selection is a property of verbal projections and not of predicative PPs, our response to Beliën’s extensive commentary on this issue is not found here, but in Section V2.1.2, sub IV, which was still in press when she wrote her review.

References

Barbiers, Sjef. 2005. Boekbespreking Adpositions and adpositional phrases. Modern Grammar of Dutch occasional papers 3. Nederlandse Taalkunde 10: 360-365.

Beliën, Maaike. 2014. Complementing adpositions and adpositional phrases: a review of Broekhuis (2013). Nederlandse Taalkunde/Dutch Linguistics 19: 287-300.