Introduction

Generally speaking, adpositional phrases resist modification with the exception of the spatial and temporal ones. So, whereas the non-spatial/temporal adpositional phrase in (1a) cannot be modified, the spatial and temporal adpositional phrases in (1b&c) can.

Note, however, that this does not hold for focus particles like alleen ‘only’ and juist ‘especially’ in (2a&b), nor for pas ‘only’ in (2c), which can also be used to modify non-temporal/spatial PPs. We will not discuss this in the present chapter because these particles can be construed with all lexical categories (see Barbiers 1995:ch.3), and thus deserve a discussion in their own right.

Section 3.1 discusses modification of spatial adpositional phrases and will show that the hypothesis that spatial adpositions denote a set of vectors is very helpful in describing the modification possibilities. Section 3.2 will show that the description of the modification possibilities of the spatial adpositional phrases can be straightforwardly extended to the temporal ones. Section 3.3 concludes by discussing the rare cases of non-spatial/temporal adpositional phrases that may undergo modification.

Spatial adpositional phrases

This section is concerned with modification of spatial adpositional phrases. It will be shown that the hypothesis that spatial adpositions denote sets of vectors is very helpful in describing the modification possibilities. For an extensive discussion of the vector hypothesis, we refer the reader to Section 1.3.1.1.