Functional and lexical prepositions across Germanic and Romance

In this chapter, lexical and functional prepositions (see van Riemsdijk 1990 and the papers in Cinque and Rizzi 2010) are compared in Germanic and Romance, in the light of a broad cartographic/nanosyntactic approach, in which all prepositional items have a complex internal structure. Such an approach offers a powerful tool not only for better describing and analyzing the complex (micro-)comparative data, but also for tracing the grammaticalization paths leading to the formation of new (lexical) Ps, which eventually could further functionalize into case marking items. The lexical and syntactic properties of both types of prepositions are considered, highlighting their differences and similarities. When considering functional prepositions, the English to and the Italian a ‘to, at’ will be considered.