Abstract

Data taken from the field of French prepositional elements clearly show that essential work in Grammaticalization Theory needs support from a framework which accounts in a fruitful way for instances of syntactic change. In this paper I show that prepositional forms which emerge from complex structures containing verb forms and relational nouns on the one band and case marking elements recruited from the lexical category P on the other can plausibly be dealt with by adopting a Minimalist perspective in the spirit of Chomsky (1995). In this context I argue that some uses of certain French P elements should be interpreted as overt realizations of inherent case, comparable to the agglutinative case affixes of Turkic languages. Furthermore I demonstrate that the emergence of new prepositional forms follows the requirements of derivational economy. Finally it is pointed out that a cube shaped Grammaticalization model accounts in a more adequate way for the facts observed than the scalar representation, traditionally assumed by Grammaticalization theorists.