Most Slavic prefixes can be assigned to one of two large cate- gories, lexical and superlexical. The lexical prefixes are like Germanic particles, in having resultative meanings, often spatial, but often id- iosyncratic. The superlexical prefixes are like adverbs or auxiliary verbs, having aspectual and quantificational meanings. I present a syntactic account of the two types of prefix, arguing that the lexical ones are to be analyzed essentially like the Germanic particles, and that their VP-internal position accounts for many of their properties, while the superlexical ones originate outside VP.

Many languages have specialized locative words or morphemes translating roughly into words like 'front,' 'back,' 'top,' 'bottom,' 'side,' and so on. Often, these words are used instead of more specialized adpositions to express spatial meanings corresponding to 'behind,' 'above,' and so on. I argue, on the basis of a cross-linguistic survey of such expressions, that in many cases they motivate a syntactic category which is distinct from both N and P, which I call AxPart for 'Axial Part'; I show how the category relates to the words which instantiate it, and how the meaning of the construction is derived from the combination of P[lace] elements, AxParts, and the lexical material which expresses them.

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There is a tension between Chomsky's recent Minimalist theory and the cartographic program initiated by Cinque. Cinque's cartography argues for a large number of finegrained categories organized in one or more universal Rich Functional Hierarchies (RFH). The subtlety of the evidence and the richness of the inventory virtually force an innatist approach. In contrast, Chomsky argues for a minimal role for UG (MUG), shifting the burden to extralinguistic cognition, learning, and what he calls third factor principles such as principles of efficient computation. In this paper we reconcile the austere MUG vision of Chomsky with the impressive empirical evidence that Cinque and others have presented for RFH. We argue (building on previous work) that some Cartographic work overstates the universality of the orders observed, and furthermore conflates several different sources of ordering. Ordering sources include scope, polarity, and semantic category. Once these factors are properly understood, there remains an irreduceable universal functional hierarchy, for example that which orders epistemic modality and tense over root modality and aspect, and that which orders the latter over argument structure and Aktionsart (as discussed in much previous work). This residual core functional hierarchy (CFH) is unexplained so far by work which follows MUG. Rather than simply stipulating the CFH as part of UG, we reconcile CFH with MUG by detailing what nonlinguistic cognition must look like in order for MUG to derive the CFH. We furthermore show how an individual language develops a languagespecific RFH which is consistent with the universal CFH, illustrating with a detailed account of the English auxiliary system.

Spatial relations, and certain other relations among entities and events, are expressed in many languages by caseless, tenseless words that grammarians often call prepositions or postpositions (adpositions). In this article I make some general observations about these words and their role in providing thematic content and licensing to DP arguments. I refer generally to adpositions and related complementless particles as members of category P, and compare the category P to V, suggesting that they share some similarities in argument structure, but that the temporal dimension of V distinguishes it fundamentally from P.