The goal of this article is to offer new empirical evidence regarding the grammatical and semantic properties of Italian spatial prepositions, and to provide a theoretical account based on this evidence. We show that Italian has four grammatical types of prepositions (simple, complex, contracted and uncontracted), and three semantic types (geometric, projective and region prepositions). By studying the syntactic distribution of prepositions and the phrases they form with measure phrases (e.g., dieci metri ‘ten meters’) we argue that a non-iso...
