Against a lexicalist account of inflected prepositions in Italian: experimental evidence from aphasia

In this work we want to address the syntax of the so-called inflected prepositions (preposizioni articolate) in Italian, relying on experimental data from clinical linguistics. We argue against the arguments of Napoli and Nevis (1987) for the existence of a lexically independent "monadic" class of inflected prepositions. The data collected here - which represent an early stage of a broader on-going work on the morphosyntax of Italian prepositions in aphasic populations - clearly show that Italian inflected prepositions are not primitives in the Lexicon, but the morphological by-product of a syntactic process of incorporation / conflation (Baker, 1988; Hale and Keyser, 1993; Julien, 2002).