El complemento directo lexicalizado
José Luis Cifuentes
Universidad de Alicante
Para la RAE (2009), un grupo numeroso de locuciones verbales contiene pronombres personales átonos, casi siempre lo, la o las, cuyo referente a veces se intuye contextualmente, pero queda sin especificar en la mayor parte de los casos: es el llamado complemento directo lexicalizado. Dado su particular comportamiento, estas construcciones normalmente son consideradas dentro de los estudios de fraseología como un tipo de locuciones con clítico (García Page, 2008: 340-342), y su estudio suele limitarse a la enumeración de las mismas y sus valores significativos. Julio Casares (1969) también dejó entrever el interés de estas unidades lingüísticas dada la interrelación de léxico, sintaxis y morfología que suponen, y señalaba la necesidad de un estudio histórico para intentar desentrañar la referencia oculta de los clíticos en estas construcciones fosilizadas. Esa propuesta de Casares ha sido la motivación del trabajo realizado: he hecho un estudio histórico, a través de los datos del CORDE y CREA, para tratar de dar cuenta la gramaticalización y subjetivización habida en las locuciones con clítico femenino. En esta ponencia presentaré el caso de pirárselas, particularmente interesante por cuanto parece mostrar una extraña compatibilidad sintáctica del constituyente representado por el clítico, pues resulta muy extraño considerar que un uso intransitivo verbal, indicando desplazamiento del sujeto, pueda combinarse con un clítico femenino plural que señala complemento directo: no parece haber ningún tipo de correferencialidad posible para las. En nuestra propuesta vamos a demostrar que dicha correferencialidad existe y permitirá aclarar sin ambages el significado de la construcción.
Palabras clave: clítico, locución, gramaticalización, subjetivización.
Referencias:
Casares, Julio (1969): Introducción a la lexicografía española, Madrid: CSIC.
García-Page, Mario (2008): Introducción a la fraseología española. Estudio de las locuciones, Barcelona: Anthropos.
R.A.E. (2009): Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.
In the belly of the beast
Antonio Fábregas
Universidad de Tromsø
The goal of this talk is to explore an approach that treats theme vowels –ThV; in Spanish, -a-, -e- and -i- marking conjugation classes– as purely syntactic objects, and specifically as projections of VP. Combining insights independently formulated by Kayne (2016), Oltra-Massuet (1999) and Solà (1994), I will propose that the real verb in cant-a 'sing-ThV' is the theme vowel. One immediate prediction of this proposal is that light verbs lacking a root lack theme vowels at the VP level, and we will show that this is correct, in fact allowing for an implicational relation between types of verbs, the height at which they are introduced and the presence or absence of ThVs at the relevant hierarchical level. A second prediction, given the convincing evidence shown in Oltra-Massuet (1999) that a single verb has more than one ThV, is that tense, aspect and mood are verbs (that is, predicates of events or situations) and all languages are 'serial verb' languages; we show that in fact this explains situations of double person agreement inside a verb. The proposal has ramifications about the nature of 1st person marking in Spanish.
Combining Nanosyntax and Qualia Structure for a better understanding of Spanish des- prefixed verbs
Elisabeth Gibert Sotelo
Universitat de Girona
This study aims at analyzing both the structural meaning and the polysemy of des- prefixed verbs in Spanish. In the literature devoted to the study of these constructions (Vañó-Cerdá 1990; Brea 1994; Martín García 2007; Serrano-Dolader 2011; Rodríguez Rosique 2011), it is usually highlighted that des-prefixed verbs may encode different senses, the most attested ones being those of physical separation (deshornar ‘to remove from the oven’), deprivation (desalar ‘to deprive of wings’), reversion (deshacer ‘to undo’), and negation (desconocer ‘not to know’). In order to analyze the structural behaviour of these predicates, a neo-constructionist model is adopted: Nanosyntax (Svenonius, Ramchand, Starke & Taraldsen 2009), according to which lexical items are syntactic constructs. As for the conceptual content associated to these verbs, it is accounted for by means of a non-canonical approach to the Generative Lexicon Theory developed by Pustejovsky (1995 and subsequent works). Particularly, it is assumed that stored lexical items are related to a Qualia Structure (QS), and that when syntactically combined with other lexical items, new senses can emerge by the interaction of their QSs at a conceptual level. The core proposal is that among des-prefixed verbs a basic meaning is always distinguishable, that of detachment from a source, which is contributed by the prefix, the syntactic structure of which is that of a Source path. The polysemy of des-prefixed verbs, thus, emerges as the result of an interplay of factors: the position of the prefix in the syntactic structure, and, at a conceptual level, the interaction between the QS of the root and that of the internal argument of the verb.
References
Brea, M. 1994. A propósito del prefijo des-. B. Pallares, P. Peira & J. Sánchez Lobato (eds.), Homenaje a María Josefa Canellada. 111-124. Madrid: Editorial Complutense.
Martín García, J. (2007). Las palabras prefijadas con des-. Boletín de la Real Academia Española, LXXXVII(CCXCV), 5-27.
Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rodríguez Rosique, S. (2011). Morphology and pragmatics of affixal negation. Evidence from Spanish des-. In J.L. Cifuentes Honrubia & S. Rodríguez Rosique (eds.), Spanish Word Formation and Lexical Creation. 145-162. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Serrano-Dolader, D. 2011. Base selection and prefixing: The prefix des-. In J. L. Cifuentes Honrubia & S. Rodríguez Rosique (eds.), Spanish Word Formation and Lexical Creation. 255-281. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Svenonius, Peter, Gillian Ramchand, Michal Starke & Tarald Taraldsen (eds.). 2009. Nordlyd 36.1. Special issue on Nanosyntax. Tromsø: Septentrio Press.
Vañó-Cerdá, A. (1990). Las correspondencias del prefijo español des- con los afijos y adverbios alemanes (miß-, ent-, zurück-, zer-, -los, los-, un-, etc.). Ibero-Romania, 31, 1–28.
El aspecto en las nominalizaciones con base adjetiva compartida
Matías Jaque Hidalgo i Josefa Martín García
Universidad de Chile i Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
En este trabajo estudiaremos las nominalizaciones deadjetivales y deverbales que comparten una base adjetiva (oscuro > oscuridad / oscurecimiento < oscurecer), con el fin de determinar qué propiedades del adjetivo se manifiestan en las nominalizaciones y cómo el aspecto del adjetivo resulta relevante en la distinción entre cualidades, estados y eventos. La discusión se centra en la distribución de lecturas que podemos encontrar en estos nombres, y sus posibles correlaciones con el proceso derivativo implicado: cualidades frente a eventos (belleza / embellecimiento), estados frente a estados resultantes ({la oscuridad / el oscurecimiento} del callejón no gustó a todos), nominalizaciones deadjetivales con contenidos eventivos (limpieza) o nominalizaciones deverbales que habilitan una lectura de cualidad (moderación). El análisis busca determinar qué propiedades estructurales de las bases (sea del adjetivo, o del verbo que se deriva de él) inciden de modo predictivo en las lecturas obtenidas, tanto en las más esperables (evento para nombres deverbales) como en las que se prestan menos para esta correlación (eventos en nombres deadjetivales).
Ele jota. Sincretismos en la primera persona del plural en variedades del español
María Mare
UNComahue/IPEHCS-CONICET
En diferentes variedades del español es posible reconocer alternancias morfológicas en la primera persona del plural, ya se trate del pronombre (losotros por nosotros), del clítico (los/lon/se por nos) o del morfema de concordancia (mo por mos). Desde una perspectiva interlingüística, es posible encontrar evidencia con respecto a los cambios que parece haber sufrido desde el latín la morfología de primera persona del plural en otras lenguas romances. Por ejemplo, el catalán conserva para la primera persona del plural el morfema –m (nosaltres cantem), algo que también sucede en rumano (noi dormim ‘dormimos’), mientras que el italiano conserva –mo (noi cantiamo). Alvar y Pottier (1993: 194- 195) señalan que en aragonés la desinencia latina –mus derivó en –nos, forma idéntica a la del clítico, en andaluz se perdió la –s y en canario la n- del pronombre y del clítico se cambia por l- (losotros, los, vámolos). Asimismo, en otras variedades del español se registra la forma se por nos (se fuimos, De Benito 2015). Estas observaciones empíricas parecen sustentar la segmentación morfológica sugerida para el español por Harris (1995), entre otros, en la que se puede reconocer un morfema vinculado a la información de persona y otro vinculado a la información de número (ver también Sigurðsson 2000). A partir de estos aspectos, proponemos que las dos diferencias dialectales más significativas se vinculan (1) al morfema de persona, que puede alternar entre m-, n- y l- -además del clítico se-, y (2) al morfema de número, que alterna entre –s, -n y Ø. En lo que respecta a la persona, discutimos las consecuencias de asumir una operación postsintáctica de empobrecimiento (Impoverishment) en el modelo de la Morfología Distribuida. En cuanto al número, la alternancia entre –n, –s y Ø se extiende a diferentes contextos que conducen a la discusión con respecto al lugar de la estructura en la que se inserta el nodo de número y a la revisión de la Condición de Intervención del Plural [Plural Intervention Condition], propuesta por Arregi&Nevins (2017). Específicamente, procuramos dar cuenta de la aparente distribución complementaria entre el morfema de plural –s y el morfema verbal de plural –n (vamo(s)no-n/ vamo(s)no-s/*vamo(s)no-s-n o *vamo(s)no-n-s).
Referencias: Alvar, Manuel y Bernard Pottier (1993): Morfología histórica del español. Madrid, Cátedra. Arregi, Karlos & Andrew Nevins (2017): “Beware Occam’s Syntactic Razor: Morphotactic Analysis and Spanish Mesoclisis”. Disponible en https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003365. De Benito, Carlota (2015): “Pero se escondíamos como las ratas: syncretism in the reflexive paradigm in Spanish and Catalan”, Isogloss, 1/1, pp. 95- 127. Harris, James (1995): “The morphology of Spanish clitics”, en Hector Campos y Paula Kempchinsky (eds.) Evolution and revolution in linguistic theory: Essays in honor of Carlos Otero. Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, pp. 168 –197. Sigurðsson, H. A. (2000): “The locus of case and agreement.” (Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax; Vol. 65). Department of Scandinavian Languages, Lund University, pp. 65- 108.
On the syntactic formation of Latin –sc- verbs
Jaume Mateu
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
In this talk I offer a syntactic account of the productive formation of Latin verbal triplets like rubere ‘to be red’ / rubescere ‘to redden’ / erubescere ‘to become totally red’; ‘to blush with shame’, which have been descriptively studied by Haverling (1994, 1996, 2000, 2003, 2008, 2010). I also compare the morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of Latin –scere verbs with the ones of Catalan –ejar verbs (Oltra-Massuet & Castroviejo 2013): e.g., cf. Lat. rubescere and Cat. vermellejar. Finally, following Acedo-Matellán and Mateu’s (2009, 2013) syntactic approach to Talmy’s (1991, 2000) typology of motion events, I address the question of why aspectual resultative prefixation is a phenomenon that is expected to be found in a satellite-framed language like Latin (e.g., inarescere ‘to start becoming dry’) but not in verb-framed languages like Catalan or Spanish.
La hipótesis de la integridad léxica, la interfaz morfología-sintaxis y lo puramente morfológico
Paul O’Neill
University of Sheffield
Lexicalism and the Principles of Morphology-free Syntax and Syntax-free Morphology have in common the assumption that there exist two separate components of grammar, one which governs the structure of words and the other the structure of phrases. And these components are subject to rules which function differently. The exact name of the component which governs the structure of words (morphology, morphological component, or lexicon), the linguistic phenomena which pertain to this component (compounding, inflectional morphology, cliticization), and the extent of the interactions between this component and that which governs phrase structure (discussions around Lexical Integrity Hypothesis) have been a matter of intense debate. In this talk I will summarise the main points of contention in the debate and emphasize the importance of appreciating the essence of principles instead of becoming entangled, ensnared, embroiled, and encumbered by details, often theoretically motivated/theoretic-specific, or formed on the basis of a limited data set (e.g., the No Phrase Constraint (Botha 1983)). The aim of this talk is to highlight what I term the real principles, as opposed to the beliefs, with respect to the differences between morphology and syntax, and their interface. With reference to Lexicalism and the Principles of Morphology-free Syntax and Syntax-free Morphology I contend that the truths are the following:
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Languages have some type of distinction between words and phrases and generally the properties and structures of the former are different from the latter.
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Words, and their structure and formation display a number of properties which are wholly unrelated to concepts of syntax.
These truths form the basis of a belief about the organization of language, which is that the rules governing the structure and formation of words and phrases are each different and they belong to different components of what is termed grammar. These two components can interact and overlap but they are not one and the same component.
Goals vs all other paths, and the syntax-morphology interface
Víctor Acedo-Matellán
Queens’ College, University of Cambridge
As I argue in Acedo-Matellán (To appear), those Latin datives interpreted as the ground with respect to spatial preverbs (e.g. flumini in-cidere “the river.DAT in-fall” ‘fall into the river’) are best analysed as applied arguments referencing an entity that “possesses” a null nominal sitting in a vP-internal PP headed by the preverb (before it attaches to the verb). However, as has been noticed in the literature (Lehmann 1989) and I further explore here, there are significant asymmetries in the range of preverbs allowed in this type of constructions. Specifically, source and route-denoting preverbs (e.g., ab- ‘away, off’ and per- ‘through, via’, respectively) seldom, if at all, license a ground-denoting dative. Basing on the work on split paths and the hierarchy of Source, Route and Goal (Gehrke 2008, Pantcheva 2011, Gibert Sotelo, In preparation), as well as the featural-incremental approach to morphemes (Caha 2009), I argue for a structural explanation: the projection of Appl, responsible for the licensing of the dative, is compatible with a PP hosting just a Goal-Place position, but not with paths hosting additional structure on top, i.e., routes (Route-Goal/Place) and sources (Source-Route-Goal/Place). I include a discussion on which theory of the syntax-morphology interface is best fitted to handle the facts, i.e., one endorsing Phrasal Spell-Out or one endorsing Terminal Spell-Out.
References
Acedo-Matellán, Víctor. To appear. Latin datives with prefixed verbs and beyond: A view from the theory of applicatives. Catalan Journal of Linguistics.
Caha, Pavel. 2009. The nanosyntax of case. PhD thesis. Universitetet i Tromsø.
Gehrke, Berit. 2008. Ps in motion: On the semantics and syntax of P elements and motion events. Utrecht: LOT Publications.
Gibert Sotelo, Elisabeth. In preparation. Source and Negative Prefixes. On the Syntax-lexicon Interface and the Encoding of Spatial Relations. PhD thesis. Universitat de Girona.
Lehmann, Christian. 1983. Latin preverbs and cases. In Harm Pinkster (ed.), Latin Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Proceedings of the 1st International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics. Amsterdam, April 1981. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 145–65.
Pantcheva, Marina B. 2011. Decomposing path: The nanosyntax of directional expressions. PhD thesis. Universitetet i Tromsø.
El caràcter complex d’algunes preposicions
Anna Bartra i Gemma Rigau
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Seguint Hale & Keyser (2002) i desenvolupaments posteriors com els de Svenonius (2006) & sq, presentem una anàlisi de les preposicions com a elements complexos formats per categories lèxiques i funcionals, la qual permet explicar-ne de manera molt més simple i unitària l'aparent diversitat de significats i usos.
Affixation across syntactic categories: The case of English -ish
Isabel Oltra-Massuet
Universitat Rovira i Virgili
The distribution of ish in (1)-(3) characterizes it as a syntactically unselective or cross-categorial morpheme, which makes it appear as a unique empirical domain for theories of the syntax-morphology interface that seek to investigate the distribution of grammatical categories in relation to the associated features underlying a particular morpheme.
(1) a. blueish, shortish
b. childish, stylish
c. skitterish, sloggish (Bauer et al. 2013: 304)
d. fortyish, sevenish
e. downish, nowish
(2) a. a man-in-the-streetish sort of opinion (Morris 1998: 208)
b. He has a how-do-you-do-ish manner. (Crystal 2011)
(3) a. Korbel: “Starting tomorrow.”
Colleen: “So we have until midnight?”
Korbel: Ish. (Davies 2012, Corpus of American Soap Operas, henceforth CASO)
b. I liked the movie … ish (Bochnak & Csipak 2014:433)
The existence of such morphemes is to some extent predicted and even expected in an exo-skeletal model of word-formation like Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994, and related work), where roots are not specified for category, all word building is syntactic, and differences between words and phrases are not a matter of architectural primitives (Embick 2010). However, the analysis of such cross-categorial derived formations represents a challenge for lexicalist theories of word formation where the output of the lexicon differs from those outputs built in the syntax. In this talk I discuss the morphosyntax of -ish in relation to its semantics, put forward in Bochnak & Csipak (2014), and suggest a unified account of all -ish forms in (1)-(3) where the cross-categorial and polysemous nature of -ish derives from a set of closely interrelated factors: (i) source of its degree variable; (ii) its context of insertion; (iii) late insertion; (iv) underspecification of ish.
References:
Bauer, Laurie, Rochelle Lieber & Ingo Plag 2013. The Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bochnak, Ryan & Eva Csipak 2014. A new metalinguistic degree morpheme. Proceedings of SALT 24: 432-452.
Crystal, David 2011. On -ish. http://david-crystal.blogspot.ae/2011/03/on-ish.html.
Davies, Mark 2012. Corpus of American Soap Operas, CASO. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/soap/. [CASO]
Embick, David 2010. Localism versus globalism in morphology and phonology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Ken Hale & Jay Keyser (eds.), The view from building 20. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 111-176.
Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz 1994. Some key features of Distributed Morphology. In Andrew Carnie & Heidi Harley (eds.), Papers on phonology and morphology. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL. 275-288.
Why lexicalists are often right about derivational morphology (even if it is syntactic)
Andrew McIntyre
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
The talk argues that some assumptions normally found in lexicalist approaches to derivational morphology are empirically correct and should be adopted even by proponents of non-lexicalist theories. The data are from various domains of derivational morphology (complex verbs, denominal verbs, compounds, category-changing affixation). Some points argued for are as follows:
Idiosyncrasies in complex words are sometimes thought to show that they are created in the lexicon. While some versions of this argument are flawed, I argue that the lexicalist idea of a connection between the lexicon and certain combinatorial operations is partly right. I describe certain seldom-discussed kinds of complex verbs that can only have been created by analogy and blending, word formation processes that make explicit reference to lexically stored expressions. However, even if we accept that these structures are created “in” the lexicon (whatever this metaphor means), this does not argue that normal compositional morphological operations are not syntactic, since analogy and blending can also form expressions that uncontroversially possess internal syntactic structure.
Many syntactic approaches to derivational morphology use head movement derivations like (1) where inherited arguments of a nonhead X are initially merged in an (extended) projection of X. A lexicalist account like (2) forces one to assume that arguments of X are merged after X forms a complex word with another head. This entails that complex words are argument-taking complex predicates, where an argument of X can be merged non-locally (this is sometimes referred to as ‘percolation of argument selection features’). In McIntyre (2014, ‘Constraining argument structure in nominalizations’ in Lingua) I argued that these derivations like (2) are empirically needed for certain –er-nominalisations and are not inimical to syntactic theories of word formation. In the talk I extend this argument to certain kinds of complex verbs and other kinds of category-changing affixation.
(1) a. [NP [N° find-er] [VP tfind [DP (of) the cat]]] b. [VP [V° over-step] [PP tover [DP the line]]]
(2) a. [NP [N° find-er] [DP/PP (of) the cat]] b. [VP [V° over-step] [DP the line]]
Lexical information in syntax, morphology, and in between
Olga Batiukova
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
There seems to be a broad consensus in current approaches to lexicon-syntax and morphology-syntax interface on what structural aspects of lexical meaning govern the construction of complex words and of syntactic structures. In lexicalist frameworks, this information is registered in the lexical entries and in constructional frameworks it is directly encoded in syntactic structure, with far-reaching consequences for the overall conception of grammar and the interaction of its different modules. The focus of this talk will be on the other part of lexical meaning (often called root, constant, or listeme), which is usually believed to be idiosyncratic and syntactically uninteresting because it has little or no syntactic consequences. In particular, it will be argued that some of these features determine and constrain both the word syntax and the phrasal syntax (i.e., morphology and phrasal structure), and that they have to be properly encoded as a part of rich lexical-semantic representations (semantic typing of lexical items) rather than as functional features moved from the encyclopedia to the syntax.
Imprudencias, infidelidades y otras nominalizaciones deadjetivales eventivas
María J. Arche i Rafael Marín
University of Greenwich i Universitat Pompeu Fabra
En este trabajo examinamos las propiedades de los nombres derivados de adjetivos. Mostramos que, junto a las dos categorías comúnmente aceptadas, la de cualidades como belleza o estados como perplejidad, existe un tercer grupo formado por aquellos nombres deadjetivales que pueden expresar ocurrencias de eventos, como imprudencia. Entre las pruebas más evidentes de tal denotación eventiva destaca su carácter contable (Cometió varias imprudencias) o la posibilidad de anclaje temporal y espacial (La imprudencia tuvo lugar en Girona un 18 de julio por la mañana). Asimismo, demostramos que los únicos nombres deadjetivales que disponen de esta lectura eventiva son los derivados de adjetivos evaluativos disposicionales.