Locatives as small clauses

Abstract

Locative phrases are assumed to denote the place where the event denoted by the predicate of the sentence takes place. Recent studies, however, have revealed that there is more to locatives than meets the eye. One such example is Maienborn’s (2001, 2003) ternary classification of locatives. She claims that there are three types of locative phrases each in different phrase structural positions and anchoring different lexical items of the sentence. These differing phrases thus lead to differing truth values. However, in doing so Maeinborn misses an important point. There is an extensive literature on the predicative uses of locative phrases, like Hoekstra & Mulder (1990) and Muromatsu (1997). This paper is an attempt to merge the main clause predicate proposal for locatives with ternary classification thus reducing it to binary classification. The underlying idea is that one of these types, Internal Modifier, is actually the pre-/postpositional predicate of the small clause embedded in the main clause. The paper concludes with a discussion on the probable small clause analysis of some other pre-/postpositional constructions.