Abstract
The poster examines one of the pathways of grammaticalization, that is a process through which adjectives become prepositions. Whereas there are a number of studies focusing on the analysis of English denominal (e.g. besides) and deverbal (e.g. during or except) prepositions, prepositions with adjectival origin have not been subjected to a comprehensive classification yet.
The aim of the poster is to determine whether adjectives exhibit common attributes in the development towards prepositions despite the fact that the grammaticalization took place during different periods of English. The list of approximately 30 potential candidates for deadjectival prepositions has been assembled. The list contains well-known words with problematic categorial status such as like, near or as well as adjectives which have undergone grammaticalization into prepositions in recent past such as absent or effective.
All of the candidates are categorized based on the morphosyntactic and semantic properties. This study hopes to determine whether these deadjectival prepositions exhibit various degrees of integration into the class of prepositions and identify those attributes (e.g. the ability to occur in non-predicate adjunct, gradeability or the loss of simple preposition to or of (e.g. opposite to the store > opposite the store)) that significantly impact the level of integration within the class of prepositions.