Intransitive prepositions in Albanian language

Abstract

The subject at hand of this paper is intransitive prepositions, which E. Klima (1965) defined as prepositions that do not select syntactic objects. This word group comprises those linguistic units which traditional grammar used to consider as bicategorical, sometimes as adverbs, and in other instances as prepositions created through conversion. Through syntactic and lexical analysis, we intend to confirm that such words in both uses are prepositions rather than adverbs. This type of phrases that are projected only X head does not take complement semantically and structurally. From this point of view, PPs that are generated at level X [P + compl] are opposed, where the presence of a complement is mandatory. Prepositions that project a PPs component at level X have [-compl] feature and are called intransitive prepositions, while prepositions with [+ compl] feature which project a PP at level X are called transitive prepositions. This means that the intuition of an Albanian speaker for the PP component is elaborated not only within the traditional framework PP-P – NP but also within PP-P structures. Another hypothesis of this paper is that the [- compl] feature of this type of prepositions is not an absolute feature, but rather a relative one – which means that we do not have genuine intransitive prepositions but rather double feature prepositions [- compl, + compl] which sometimes appear as intransitive, sometimes as transitive which – similar to transitive verbs with intransitive use – we have called ergative prepositions.