Poster at NELS

I’ve just returned from Nels 57, hosted by the City University of New York. Thank you to all the organizers at CUNY for their hard work in putting on this conference!

I presented a poster, which was titled “On the asymmetry between source and goal in complex directional PPs”.

I present a decompositional analysis of complex PPs of the form from X to Y. These have been observed in English since at least Jackendoff (1973), but have received little attention since. I draw novel generalizations demonstrating that English has a complex strategy for directional PPs, and I capture the new facts with an articulated structure containing multiple P heads, which compose into a single path description via a flexible semantics in the spirit of Zwarts (2005). We then argue that this structure obtains generally for English source prepositions—meaning that even “simple” source PPs are far more complex than typically thought.