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

from the same structural position, then Reinhart’s framework should be adopted. The
two different views of Theta theory will be compared and analysed, although my thesis
will be, as already noted, framed within Reinhart’s theta system, making it clear that I
consider her system superior to that of HK.
Given that the Catalan data will involve many reflexive Vs, a position as to
how to consider them will be taken. That is, my study will try to provide an answer to
the question of whether reflexive Vs should be treated as either unaccusative (Grimshaw
(1990), Sportiche (1998)) or unergative (Reinhart & Siloni (1999)) entries.
Speakers’s judgements will be considered to corroborate the data obtained
from the dictionaries (see Appendix C), and another proposal, namely HK’s (1993,
1998, 2002) will be discussed to see how their analysis can explain the data presented in
section 4. If their account can deal with the data satisfactorily, that will mean that my
analysis should be revised and modified accordingly.
This thesis is organized as follows. Section 2 contains some theoretical
background to understand Reinhart’s theta system (2.1), a brief explanation of the
different approaches to reflexives (2.2), some discussion about Θ-percolation and
inheritance (2.3) and the main approaches proposed in the literature to deal with the socalled
parasynthetic structures (2.4). Section 3 provides the research methods as well as
the sources of the data on which my study is based. In section 4 the results of the data
are presented and discussed. Finally section 5 provides the present thesis with some
conclusions and questions for further research.
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