Serbian Ps with and without iz and the Superset Principle

Abstract

This paper explores the syntactic behaviour of two classes of apparently synonymous prepositions in Serbian. It is shown that the two classes differ in the degree to which they allow measure phrases and null DP-complements. The analysis proposed captures the observed differences in terms of a detailed syntactic decomposition of PPs, as well as relates the syntactic behaviour of each class to their morphological make-up. The analysis is then extended to account for a similar pattern in English. The goal is to show how the properties of various types of Ps in both English and Serbian can be made to follow from the lexical specification of the particular vocabulary items found in each language.