Reflection on the role of prepositions in distinguishing nominal complements of nouns from prepositioned adnominal adjun

Abstract

The similar way in which the noun complements of substantives and the prepositional noun adjuncts are presented, usually causes some embarrassment in the distinction of these sentence terms for categorization purposes. Normative and pedagogical manuals tend to anchor this distinction in the concreteness/abstraction of the noun that precedes the preposition and in the agentivity of the prepositional term, which follows from an analogy with the use of certain prepositions together with the genitive and dative cases of Latin for the purposes of clarity. Thus, this work sought, from a bibliographic analysis in Latin and Portuguese manuals, to elucidate the distinction between these two terms and to propose a merely syntactic criterium to distinguish them. The analysis was delimited to the prepositional terms that bind to substantive nouns and the hypothesis was explored that the type of preposition could be relevant to determine the syntactic function considering the classification of the essential and accidental prepositions. The results obtained indicate that there is a distinction between the two terms, but that this derives not from the type of preposition that heads it, but from the property of the substantive noun to require or only admit a prepositional term.