1. A syntactic approach to the morpho-semantic variation of -ear.
- Author
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Oltra-Massuet, Isabel and Castroviejo, Elena
- Subjects
- *
SEMANTICS , *SPANISH verbs , *ADJECTIVALS (Grammar) , *NATURAL languages , *DIALECTS , *LANGUAGE & languages - Abstract
This paper deals with the morpho-syntactic properties of Spanish verbs formed by - ear affixation (EAV henceforth). These include deadjectival (e.g. amarillear ‘to go yellow’), denominal (e.g. fanfarronear ‘to behave like a boaster’), and deverbal verbs (e.g. bailotear ‘to dance in an irregular manner’), which do not form a natural semantic class. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to develop a unified morpho-syntactic analysis of EAV within Hale and Keyser's (1993) approach to argument structure – as developed in Mateu (2002) and Acedo-Matellán and Mateu (2011, 2013) – and Distributed Morphology; second, to take this proposal as a basis to account for cross-dialectal variation in the productivity of EAV. We group EAV into three basic syntactic classes that share a core structure v + P. We argue that a large subset of unergative verbs must be analyzed as events with a specifier that select for a relational/predicative complement, a type of structure that is shown to underlie verbs with an adverbial argument. - Ear is further checked against unmarked - ar , the default verb-forming suffix in Iberian Spanish. We show that an underspecified analysis of EAV is compatible with cross-dialectal variation in that it accommodates the (non-)predictable range of meanings found across American varieties where - ear has become the default verbalizer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2014
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