Valency and prepositions: comparative and contrastive Slovene-English aspects

The present article aims to shed some light on the combinability of verbs, nouns and adjectives with prepositions – a phenomenon which is common both in Slovene and in English, but has not been extensively commented on by Slovene linguists. In Anglo-American linguistics, such combinations with prepositions are basically divided into two groups, which tend to be named differently by authors of different linguistic orientations. The article deals with valency and government-binding capacity of prepositions from the contrastive (Slovene-English) viewpoint. Prepositional collocations can be regarded as results of natural semantic- and structural-syntactic (valencyrelated) combining or binding of words, as mutual semantic and syntactic expectancy of words. While a lexicalized preposition is bound to the entire meaning of the multi-word unit (dictionary unit) it co-forms with the lexical word and its government, a non-lexicalized preposition is bound only to one sense of the dictionary unit. The differentiation between lexicalized and non-lexicalized prepositions in Slovene can be illustrated by delexical primary verbs.