The Syntax of “Complex Prepositions” in German: An HPSG Approach

Many modern languages commonly use expressions that seem unpredictable regarding standard grammar regularities. Among these expressions, sequences consisting of a preposition, a noun, another preposition, and another noun are particularly frequent. The issue of these expressions, usually termed in linguistic literature as "complex prepositions", "phrasal prepositions" or "preposition-like word formations", can certainly be considered to be a cross-linguistic problem (On "complex prepositions" in German and in other languages see (Benes 1974), (Buscha 1984)}, (Lindqvist 1994), (Meibauer 1995), (Quirk and Mulholland 1964), (Wollmann 1996). In this paper, I will focus exclusively on German data, because they provide very explicit and convincing linguistic evidence which motivates and supports my approach. However, I assert that the analysis proposed here for German can also be applied to other languages such as Polish or English.