On some postpositional elements in Danish

This paper investigates the distribution of a number of postpositional elements in Danish. The main findings are the following:

(i) Some postpositional constructions are used for abstract notions such as temporal relations rather than literal, spatial relations.

(ii) The head nouns of postpositional complements are often semantically bleached nouns such as sted ‘place’, vej ‘street’, vegne ‘streets’ (an archaic plural form of vej).

(iii) Some postpositional elements have the function of adding referents to or subtracting them from a set of referents.

(iv) There is not always free variation between the prepositional and post- positional construction. This is because there is often a semantic differ- ence between the two constructions, and because the preposition and the postpositional element differ in what kinds of complement they can select.