The paper presents an analysis of motion verbs and spatial prepositions, which eliminates the need to treat the use of the same prepositions in static and dynamic locative expressions (in Romanic languages) as a case of homonymy. The semantics of the verbal complexes can be compositionally built using only the static sense of prepositions. The proposed approach was developed with the purpose of providing an efficient way of parsing Italian locative utterances, while preserving a principle-based organization of the grammar within the HPSG theory. This result has been obtained by exploiting the interaction of the three independently motivated modules of the grammatical organization, viz. the theory of Aktionsart, Linking Theory, and Control Theory. The paper describes, in the standard grammatical formalism of HPSG (C. Pollard, I. Sag; 1994), the lexical entries for prepositions and for motion verbs, and provides a compositional mechanism which relates the syntactic argument structure to the semantic representation (Linking Theory), based on the standard assumptions that behave as arguments rather than adjuncts. The Control Theory is then used to identify, through index binding, the participant that effectively undergoes a change of position in the motion event.
Reviewer: Neculai Curteanu (Iaşi)