Lexis (Jan 2016)

Estructura sintáctica de las construcciones con verbos parasintéticos de los tipos a-…-ar y en-…-ar

  • Gabriel Martínez Vera

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 40, no. 2
pp. 243 – 292

Abstract

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I postulate an unitary syntactic structure for constructions with a-…-ar and en-…-ar parasynthetic verbs through four hypothesis: both patterns have a common basic syntactic structure regarding vP and VP, whose heads are CAUSE and BECOME, respectively; the difference between the patterns lies on, within a scale of affectedness (Beavers 2011), the fact that a-…-ar assigns (compositionally) a result state to the theme, while this does not happen with en-…-ar. I claim that affectedness is a binary operator located higher than vP that quantizes the event determining the specificity of the result state for the object; and the morphological form of the operator is a- (if its value is positive) or en- (if its value is negative).

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