Locatives in Shona and Luganda

At a general level, Chapter 1 is concerned with the categorization of expressions in natural languages. The authors approach this question with a relatively new tool in hand: phrasal spellout (Starke 2009). If phrasal spellout exists, a single item may correspond to several terminals, where each terminal has a distinct label. As a consequence, the approach predicts the existence of expressions whose behavior corresponds to a mixture of prototypical categorical properties. The chapter applies this relatively new analytical option to locative markers in Shona and Luganda. It contrasts them with more familiar Indo-European adpositions, in order to show that their behavior is distinct from ordinary adpositions and other word classes. The behavior of the new class, however, is not explained by positing a new category in the decomposed projection, but by proposing that it corresponds to a combination of several existing categories.