morphological? - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Goal
• present work in progress
• show that a proposal made by Grimshaw (2005 [1991]) allows an explanation of the
Spanish data as well as of the contrast between Spanish and French
Outline
2 Spanish infinitives
3 French infinitives
4 Towards an analysis
2 Spanish
Database
• corpus of 2275 nominalized infinitives from the 12th to 20th century, drawn from the
Corpus del Español (www.corpusdelespanol.org; access is free)
• contains written language; part of the 20th century subcorpus also contains
spoken Spanish
• 100 million words
• 20 million words from the 13th to 15th century
• 40 million words from the 16th to 18th century
• 40 million words from the 19th to 20th century
Criteria with regard to which constructions with nominal infinitives differ
• choice of determiners
o all determiners vs. only definite article and possessive determiner
• participant (argument) structure
o yes vs. no
o if yes:
realization of a participant as direct object: yes vs. no
realization of a participant as a prepositional phrase headed by de
realization of a participant by means of a clitic pronoun: yes vs. no
overt subject: yes vs. no
• modification by means of adverbs vs. adjectives
Some criteria seem to form clusters.
It is unclear where to set the limits between clusters.
Types of constructions with nominal infinitives
• Two different constructions (Plann 1981; also de Miguel 1996)
• Three-way classifications have been proposed by, e.g., Yoon & Bonet-Farran (1991),
Ramírez (2003).
Other criteria
• reference to an event vs. to a fact or proposition
• occurrence with different types of matrix constructions (e.g., with perception verbs
like escuchar 'listen', with factive verbs like lamentar 'regret', ...)
• compatibility with verbs of different classes (e.g., only with intransitives, only with
unergative intransitive verbs etc., )
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