A note on functional adpositions

A case can be made, as in Zwarts (1997), that all adpositions (preand postpositions) are nonlexical elements: adpositions form a closed class, they are often grammaticalized nouns or verbs, and they generally serve to link constituents (turning a noun phrase into a complement or adjunct). But unlike true functional elements, adpositions are generally not without referential content — albeit that the concept referred to is not an entity but an element of spatio-temporal organization. Discussion of the lexicalfunctional opposition with adpositions, then, often centers on the literal vs. metaphorical use of the adposition, as in at home vs. (good) at math. But as Tseng (2001) shows, the relevant distinction is not clear-cut and solid criteria for classifying adpositions along those lines do not exist. Still, it would seem that referential content is a useful criterium for distinguishing lexical and functional adpositions. I take functional elements (with Abney 1987) to be devoid of descriptive content. A grammaticalized noun, such as Dutch richting ‘direction, in the direction of’ is not devoid of content and will therefore still count as a lexical adposition. The same holds for the more peripheral use of at in (good) at math. But of in a hell of a story or the city of Boston or out of the blue seems to function as a mere linker, without a trace of the core meaning of a lexical adposition of (see Zwarts 1997 and Van Eynde 2004 for similar considerations). My tentative definition of a functional adposition, then, is in (1):