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In recent years syntactic work on base positions for arguments has been extended to modifiers, providing evidence that modifiers do in fact have fixed base positions; cf. Frey (1993), Maienborn (1996), Frey & Pittner (1997). Most strikingly, one and the same modifier phrase may exploit different base adjunction sites leading to distinct semantic interpretations. The present paper addresses the semantics of prepositional phrases that are adjoined at sentence level; cf. the examples in (1).
(1)
Mit der Bahn dauert die Fahrt zwei
Stunden.
'With the train takes the trip two hours.'
Für den Schiedsrichter hat der
Ball die Linie berührt.
'For the referee has the ball the line
touched.'
In seinem Heimatdorf ist Peter
Schlönzke weltberühmt.
'In his home town village is Peter
Schlönzke world-famous.'
Prepositional sentence modifiers are shown to have a base position within the verb's functional projection. Their semantic contribution consists of restricting the topic of the sentence. The semantic analysis that will be proposed is based on the notion of a Topic Situation. A contextual parameter s* representing the topic situation is introduced by the first functional head of VP and serves as a pivot for subsequent compositional processes until it is blocked by an ensuing functional head. Prepositional sentence modifiers are analyzed then as natural language devices for restricting the underlying topic situation of a sentence.
The proposal makes two crucial claims w.r.t. s*: First, the parameter for s* is not introduced by the modifying expression itself but by its structural environment, viz. the functional shell of VP. Second, the ontological status of s* is that of a situation in the Davidsonian sense, i.e. an entity that can be located in space and time and may have participants, instruments etc. These two assumptions enable a compositional semantics' account for prepositional sentence modifiers that is based on independently motivated lexical semantic representations of prepositions and supports an extensional semantics for modification.
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