Boundedness in locative prepositions: Evidence from Catalan

This paper provides evidence from Catalan for the existence of bounded and unbounded locative prepositions, and proposes that boundedness in the adpositional domain is derived similarly to boundedness in the verbal, nominal or adjectival domains. Our contribution is both empirical and theoretical. First, we show that Catalan has two simple locative prepositions, a and en, which form a minimal pair as far as boundedness is concerned and exhibit, correspondingly, different selection patterns: while bounded a only selects DPs with a quantity interpretation, unbounded en can combine with both NPs and DPs, which receive a homogeneous interpretation. Second, we develop a syntactic and semantic theory to account for these facts that relates them to the crosscategorial property of boundedness: a-PPs, but not en-PPs, contain an aspectual projection that imposes the interpretation that the otherwise homogeneous region denoted by the preposition is delimited. Moreover, we show that the difference between the structures licensed by a and en has consequences for the interpretation of quantifiers within PPs. Specifically, we set eyes upon a particular context in which a and en take a universally quantified singular DP as complement and form a minimal pair. We propose that while the bounded preposition a allows for the interpretation of the quantifier tot ‘all’ as a universal quantifier of parts, the unbounded preposition en does not. Instead, with en the quantifier behaves as an adjective of sorts associated to a maximality operator. Our paper contributes to furthering our understanding of boundedness across categories in human language.