Prefixation in English and Catalan - Departament de Filologia ...

involvement in the event’ (p. 495). In other words, only those Vs denoting processes
which can be initiated and continued without an agent will allow the causative
alternation. This claim is confirmed by the data of this section. Vs like ennoble and
clean require the presence of an agent, and accordingly do not permit an unaccusative
variant, where the agent would be suppressed. By contrast, Vs like thin and sweeten do
not need the participation of an agent for the process to initiate and continue, and admit
both the transitive and unaccusative variants. The conclusion is that my data favour a
semantic account, rather than a syntactic one. It is not the syntactic category of the
element which gets incorporated (A) but the semantics of the V that determines whether
a V will show the transitivity alternations.
To summarize this section, we have seen that the analysis proposed for Catalan
deadjectival Vs can be maintained for the three types (the type embolden does not
constitute a fourth group due to its single membership) of deadjectival Vs found in
English. Like in Catalan, the RHR can be observed: the prefix en- is responsible neither
for the conversion of As to Vs nor for the [+c] role present in A-based Vs in their
transitive variant. I have shown that the element responsible for the conversion and
addition of the [+c] role is a suffix, which can be empty (zero-suffix) or full (-en suffix),
depending on some phonological constraints. Now I would like to conclude this section
by noting the productivity of each group briefly. The first one (type enrich) is nonproductive,
and closed (only seven forms). The zero-suffixed group which has no prefix
(type clean) is more productive and finally the productivity of the en-suffixed group
(type sweeten) is subject to some phonological constraints. I will take up the issue of
productivity in the Discussion section.
4.2.3 N-to-V prefixations
At first sight, the picture for Catalan denominal prefixation is duplicated in the English
data. Three different semantic patterns can also be differentiated: location Vs with the
paraphrase ‘to put something/somebody in/onto/towards N’ (58), locatum Vs which can
be paraphrased as ‘to put N around/in/into something/somebody’ (59), and Vs of
creation with the semantic paraphrase ‘to make N’ (60). 26
26 Appendix A, section E shows the classification just mentioned. Although it contains another semantic
pattern (i.e. ‘to give N’), that has been subsumed within the locatum Vs.
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