Afrikaans circumpositions

Abstract

Circumpositions in Afrikaans present several puzzles: (i) they always encode spatial paths, but spatial paths can also be encoded by prepositional phrases; (ii) they can be doubling or non-doubling, and (iii) they exhibit disharmonic word order of the kind that appears to violate the Final-over-Final Condition (FOFC). In this paper, I argue that circumpositions offer support for the existence of a directional head [dir] in the fine structure of the Afrikaans verbal domain, and that this head is lexicalised by adpositional material in circumpositional expressions. I show that Afrikaans grammar distinguishes Route-paths from Goal-/Source-paths, and argue that whereas [dir] selects a [pathP] in the structure underlying Goal-/Source-paths (circumpositional expressions), Route-paths (prepositional expressions) are ‘bare’ [pathP] structures. I argue that since circumpositions identify structural components in different spellout domains, double-insertion of adposition-like material is required to exhaustively lexicalise the structure, and the disharmonic word order is understood as a direct consequence of the fact that [dir] is located in Afrikaans’ head-final verbal, which addresses the concern arising around FOFC. Finally, given that the adpositions in circumpositional expressions are shown to occupy structural positions that are distinct from that of de-adpositional V-particles, the paper also addresses the structural relation between circumpositions and particle verbs in which adposition-like material lexicalises a resultative [res] node in the verbal domain.