Reflections on cerca de, the valuation of the measurement complements

Abstract

The different attempts to categorise cerca followed by the preposition de as an expression of spatial location, as opposed to its categorisation as an expression of temporal location and approximative value, has led me to delve further into the uses of cerca de in contemporary Galician. Its widespread use in quantitative expressions, found in combination with verbs indicating size, distance and duration, calls for a revision of the syntactic classification of the so-called size complements. On the basis of the data from Galician, the present paper challenges the categorisation of both cerca de as a preposition and of size complements functioning as direct objects.