CATEGORIAL REANALYSIS - THE CASE OF DEVERBAL PREPOSITIONS

The recategorization of verbs as prepositions is a widespread phenomenon in the world's languages. This article analyzes the historical development of deverbal prepositions and conjunctions on the basis of data from Germanic and Romance languages. Section 1 identifies a variety of interacting and mutually reinforcing changes in the phonological and morphological structure, in the syntax and the meaning of the relevant expressions, as they are generally found in processes of grammaticalization. In section 2 deverbal prepositions are characterized as a heterogeneous and peripheral subclass within the class of prepositions. Section 3 examines the process of categorial reanalysis in the light of the feature decomposition generally used in the categorization of major lexical classes in recent syntactic theory. In section 4 some striking semantic differences between European languages and languages with serial-verb constructions in the relevant domain are discussed and an explanation is offered for the differences observed.