Abstract

This article examines the question of whether bis, ab, von and seit should be regarded as atypical prepositions. The investigation is based on the nature of their syntactic complement. The atypical syntactic behaviour of bis is due to the fact that it cannot have a nominal group with an article as a complement, e. g. *bis den Fluss, *bis das nächste Wochenende. The typical complement of bis is an adverbial; in such cases, bis does not exercise case regency (accusative). Von, ab, seit are typical dative prepositions. They also have syntactic features in common with bis. In this paper on the syntactic behaviour of the four lexemes, a new classification of them is proposed on the basis of the new word class pre-adverb.