Locative Complements of Verbs of Movement in Czech: Some Typical Structures and Their Interpretation

This paper describes the syntactic properties of three types of locative complements in Czech that are compatible with verbs of movement. The distinction between these complements (each with its own interpretation) is made in the first place on the basis of several formal criteria (in particular, involving the rich Czech morphology), and, in addition, on semantic criteria. It is examined whether there exists sufficient correspondence between these criteria, and in particular, to what extent they can satisfactorily classify locative complements into essential and circumstantial ones. It is shown that there is no clear-cut distinction between these two categories of locative complements with Czech movement verbs. Furthermore, the syntactic role of the locative complements is shown to depend mainly on the verb, but also on other elements of the sentence. Finally, on the basis of several examples, it is argued that, on the one hand, the form of the complement does not predict its syntactic role and interpretation and, on the other hand, that two different forms can share the same syntactic role and interpretation.