A Syntactic Analysis of Instrumental Prepositional Phrases

This paper deals with those Catalan and Spanish Prepositional Phrases (PP), introduced by the prepositions amb (Catalan) - con (Spanish), that designate the instrument used to carry out the action expressed by the verb. I analyse them as a small clause that has a dyadic predicate: the preposition. I propose that the Instrumental PP forms an independent derivation that must merge with a verbal syntactic derivation in order to get licensed. Finally, I suggest that the minimalist analysis I propose for Instrumental PP can be extended to some Comitative PP.