In this article we propose that relational adjectives are amenable to a configurational morphological analysis where form and meaning are isomorphic. We argue that relational adjectives are, in fact, nouns which contain in their internal syntactic structure a semantically defective matrix of features which is spelled out as an adjectival affix. This proposal allows us to explain many of the morphological, semantic and syntactic properties of relational adjectives, among them the existence of bracketing paradoxes, the iteration of suffixes or their combination with prefixes that denote groups of individuals, such as bi-, mono-or poly-.

In this article I revisit the well-known empirical problem of manner of motion verbs with directional complements in Spanish. I present some data that, to my mind, had not received due attention in previous studies and I show that some manner of motion verbs actually allow directionals with the preposition a, while all of them allow them with prepositions like <em>hacia</em> or <em>hasta</em>. I argue that this pattern is due to a principle that states that every syntactic feature must be identified by lexical insertion, the Exhaustive Lexicalisation Principle. The crucial problem with directional complements is that the Spanish preposition <em>a</em> is locative, in contrast with English <em>to</em>, and, therefore, unable to identify the Path feature. Some verbs license the directional with a because they can lexicalise Path altogether with the verb; all verbs can combine with <em>hasta</em> or <em>hacia</em> because these prepositions lexicalise Path. When neither the verb nor the preposition lexicalise the Path, the construction is ungrammatical.

This chapter deals with the notion of head inside compounds. We will first focus on the unproblematic cases which have led researchers to determine that compounds contain a head (Section 1). Then we will analyse more problematic cases, showing that some of the properties of heads (such as their position inside the word) are not completely understood (Section 2). Problematic cases of exocentricity or multiple headedness inside compounds will be considered in Section 3, while Section 4 briefly explores the possibility that compounds contain more than one head. The main conclusion of this paper is that there are empirical grounds to propose the existence of heads inside compounds, but the determination of their properties and the identification of the units that play this role for a given feature require detailed language-particular and typological research yet to be done, although some generalizations can already be made.

In this article I identify some Spanish words as AxParts (Svenonius 2006) and I discuss their properties, some of which have already been noted in the previous literature. I show that there are three characteristics of these elements that contrast with English AxParts, and I provide an analysis that allows a unified analysis of AxParts in Spanish and English by deriving all three differences from the same independent property: the syntactic representation of part-whole relationships. A second contribution of this article is that I argue that the difference between two series of AxParts that have been identified in Spanish follow naturally if the members of one of the series select a DP as their ground, while those of the second series take a phonologically empty pronoun.

Abstract. This article provides with a state of the art of how the Individual Level / Stage Level distinction –and the related but distinct issue of the distribution of ser / estar– is instantiated in Spanish. We argue that the IL / SL distinction can be understood in two different ways: as a contrast between properties predicated of an individual or of a stage of that individual, and as a contrast between temporally persistent properties and temporary ones. The paper ends with a specific proposal about how to capture the distinction inside a structural system.