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Home Sweet Home
Chris Collins
December 2007 

The word “home” can be used as a directional or a (non-directional) locative, as shown in the following examples: (1) a. They went home. (directional) b. They stayed home. (locative) This paper will attempt to explain the following asymmetry between the overt realization of “to” and the overt realization of “at” with the word “home”: (4) a. I went (*to) home. b. I did my homework *(at) home. c. I stayed (at) home. The main theoretical conclusions of the paper are as follows. First, the condition governing the pronunciation of prepositions is a generalization of the Doubly-Filled Comp Filter, reformulated as an economy condition on Spell-Out. Second, I show that the notion of “light noun” as put forth in Kishimoto (2000) to account for the properties of expressions like “somebody” and “nothing”, also plays a role in the syntax of “home” and other locative expressions in English. Third, my paper makes a contribution to the growing literature on the internal structure of PPs (see Koopman 2000). In particular, I show that “from” should be analyzed as “from AT”, and that particles such as “in” should be analyzed as “AT/TO in”.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/001967 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	NYU Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 1
keywords:	light nouns, prepositions, syntax
Downloaded:	1269 times

 

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