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Bare nominals and incorporating verbs in Spanish and Catalan1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2010

M. TERESA ESPINAL  and
LOUISE McNALLY
M. TERESA ESPINAL*
Affiliation:
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
LOUISE McNALLY*
Affiliation:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
*
Authors' addresses: (Espinal) Dept. de Filologia Catalana/Centre de Lingüística Teòrica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Campus de Bellaterra, 08193Bellaterra, Spain[email protected]
(McNally) Dept. de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, carrer de Roc Boronat, 138, 08018Barcelona, Spain[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of bare nominals unmarked for number (BNs) occurring in object position in Spanish and Catalan, on which the BN is a syntactic complement to the verb, but not a semantic argument. After describing the properties that distinguish BNs from other indefinite expressions (bare plurals, indefinite singulars preceded by un ‘a’, and bare mass terms), we argue that these BNs occur in a monadic syntactic configuration in the sense of Hale & Keyser (1998),that they denote first-order properties, and that they are combined with the verb via a modified version of Dayal's (2003) semantics for pseudo-incorporation. Specifically, the proposal consists of a lexical rule that generates the class of verbs that productively accept BN objects, plus a composition rule that treats the BN as modifier of the verb. We point out the advantages of this analysis over three other well-known semantic analyses for combining verbs with property-type nominals. Finally, we show how the analysis can be naturally extended to existential sentences, which combine with BNs although, prima facie, they do not appear to meet the lexical conditions for doing so.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 87 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

[1]

We thank Mark Baker, Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin, Brenda Laca, Jaume Mateu, two anonymous JL referees, and the audiences of the III Nereus International Workshop: Definiteness, Specificity and Animacy in Ibero-Romance Languages (Alcalá de Henares, 2006), the Cognitive Science and Language Workshop (Barcelona, 2006), the Workshop on Bare Nouns and Nominalizations (Stuttgart, 2007), the 38th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (Urbana-Champaign, 2008), the IV NEREUS International Workshop on Definiteness and DP structure in Romance Languages (Bellaterra, 2008), the Workshop on Bare Singulars, Argument Structure and Their Interpretation (Bellaterra, 2008), the Workshop on Converging Linguistics and Cognitive Science: Nominal Systems Across Languages (Barcelona, 2009), and the Workshop on Bare Nouns: Syntactic Projections and their Interpretation (Paris, 2009). We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grants HUM2006-13295-C02-01FILO, HF2007-0039, HUM2007-60599) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (grants 2009SGR1079, 2009SGR0076e, a Distinció de la Generalitat per a la Promoció de la Recerca Universitària, and two ICREA Acadèmia awards).

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