Semantic approaches to the study of denominal parasynthetic verbs in Spanish

Abstract

This paper puts forward an analysis of Spanish denominal parasynthetic verbs based on the assumption that these formations express an event of change (either of state or of location), and that their meaning depends on three elements: the type of noun they incorporate, the directionality encoded by the prefix, and the kind of internal argument they select. In order to carry out such an analysis, two semantic theories of lexical decomposition have been used: Jackendoff’s (1983, 1990) model of Conceptual Semantics and Pustejovsky’s (1995) theory of the Generative Lexicon. The first model allows us to classify the verbs under study from the standpoint of their lexical-conceptual structure, which makes evident the structural parallelisms existing in their meaning. On the other hand, the model developed by Pustejovsky gives us the opportunity to explore some additional aspects related to the compositional meaning of these formations, enabling us to demonstrate the relevance of the internal argument in relation to the (regular and irregular) polysemy of these constructionsThis research has been supported by two projects funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación—FFI2011-29440-CO3-02 (Periferias y cambio lingüístico: descripción, teoría y aplicaciones) and FFI2011-24183 (Portal de léxico hispánico: documentación y morfología derivativa)—, one project granted by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad—FFI2014-56968-C4-4-P (Variación en la interficie morfología-sintaxis)— and by the FPU grant AP2012-1445 from the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Our work has also benefited from a grant from the Departament de Filologia i Comunicació at the Universitat de Girona (Ajut a la recerca 2014), as well as from the program Suport als Grups de Recerca (2014 SGR 1013) financed by the Generalitat de Catalunya

Deriving ablative, privative, and reversative meanings in Catalan and Spanish

“…If, as proposed in this study, ablative, privative, and reversative verbs involve the same syntactic structure, then the question that arises is how the different interpretation of each semantic class is obtained. Following insights in Batiukova (2008Batiukova ( , 2016, Pujol Payet (2014), Gibert Sotelo & Pujol Payet (2015), and Gibert-Sotelo (2017b), the view that I adopt here is that the particular interpretation of each verb class results from the interplay between the QS of the root and the QS of the DP internal argument with which it combines, an interplay that I assume to take place at a conceptual level, once spellout has occurred and the syntactic structure has been replaced by lexical material.…”

“…Moreover, it is not always clear whether certain verbs entail an ablative or a privative meaning, as is the case of, for instance, Catalan/Spanish despistar 'to distract', which may be understood either as 'to detach from the pista ['trail/clue']' (the ablative reading) or as 'to make lose the pista ['trail/clure']' (the privative reading). Accordingly, I assume that the lexical roots of the different semantic subclasses of des-parasynthetic verbs must be understood as predicates and, more precisely, as states (see Labelle 2000;Mateu 2001Mateu , 2002Acedo-Matellán 2006;Gibert Sotelo & Pujol Payet 2015;and Gibert-Sotelo 2017b). In particular, I argue that both ablative and privative verbs take an internal argument that corresponds to a Figure (or Theme) that departs from the state associated to the root.…”

Revisiting -ej(ar) verbs in Catalan: Argument and event structure

“…Therefore, the precise meaning of intransitive -ej(ar) verbs, and hence their dynamic or non-dynamic interpretation, depends on the QS of their root and the interaction it establishes, at the conceptual level, with the QS of the (root of the nominal) external argument. 10 Specifically, and following insights in works that have used QS to account for the polysemy of derived verbs (Batiukova 2008(Batiukova , 2016Pujol Payet 2014;Gibert Sotelo & Pujol Payet 2015;Gibert-Sotelo 2016, 2017; see also Schroten 1997), we assume that the verbal root exploits certain pieces of information contained in the QS of the argument it coappears with -a mechanism known as selective binding (Pustejovsky 1995) or exploitation (Pustejovsky 2013).…”

“…Pustejovsky et al 2006) followed by the particular value assigned to it. Even though in our structures the constitutive quale is not specified (since its value is not relevant for the verbs here analysed), the formalization used would be parallel to the one used by Batiukova (2016) (also adopted in Gibert Sotelo & Pujol Payet 2015and Gibert-Sotelo 2017: the function "contain" would be used to specify the parts of an object and the function "be in" would be used to specify what the object is part of. Finally, the agentive and telic qualia, which specify, respectively, the event by means of which an object comes into being and the event an object is able to perform, will be formalized in the shape of an eventive verbal predicate.…”

“…At this point, the question could be raised of how QS would work in transitive -ej(ar) predicates. In the particular case of -ej(ar) verbs yielding a gradual change of state reading, as in (44), we assume, following works which have analysed transitive change of state verbs in terms of QS (see Batiukova 2008, as well as Pujol Payet 2014, Gibert Sotelo & Pujol Payet 2015, and Gibert-Sotelo 2017, that the mechanism of selective binding or exploitation applies between the verbal root and the internal argument (and not between the root and the external argument, as we…”