Transitivity and self-caused readings in Spanish deverbal nouns

Title: Transitivity and self-caused readings in Spanish deverbal nouns
Source document: Linguistica Brunensia. 2017, vol. 65, iss. 1, pp. 21-36
Extent
21-36
  • ISSN
    1803-7410 (print)
    2336-4440 (online)
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
 

Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.

Abstract(s)
This paper examines the structural properties underlying the distribution and interpretation of two types of deverbal nouns in Spanish: miento nominals (e.g. hundimiento 'the sinking') and do/da nominals (e.g. secado 'the drying'); the first may combine with unaccusatives and verbs that enter the causative alternation, targeting the anticausative reading. By contrast, the latter type may select unergatives and the so-called incremental theme verbs, yielding a causative reading. Based on empirical evidence, I argue that the distributional and interpretive differences observed follow from the fact that these nominalizers are sensitive to different syntactic configurations in the event domain: building on Ramchand's decompositional analysis, I propose that the event structure of do/da nominals identifies a sequence [initi, proci], where subjects are interpreted as thematic Actors, and I show how this correlates with the absence of miento and the impossibility of reflexive readings (e.g. lavado 'the washing *of oneself /*by itself').
Note
This work has been supported by the Research Group HiTT (Basque Government, IT769-13).
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