morphological? - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Example with an indefinite article
(46) el comentario ... debe ser ... [ un hablar el comentarista a su vez de sí mismo ] [CdE]
'The comment should be the commentator speaking on his part about himself'
Compatibility with different verb classes
• Preference for intransitive verbs
• Historical examples with transitive verbs can be found
Adverbs/adjectives
• Compatible with adverbs and adjectives; preferred with adverbs
Creo que nos favorece ...
(47) el incesante pertenecer nosotros al municipio
(48) el siempre haber pertenecido nosotros al municipio
(49) el haber pertenecido nosotros continuamente al municipio
'I believe that our incessant belonging
our having always belonged
our having continuously belonged to the municipality favours us'
• That the infinitive with subject is marginal is also confirmed by the corpus study (Table
1 on p. 8, Figure 1 on p. 9).
Table 1. Occurrences of the constructions with nominal infinitives in the Corpus del Español.
cent-
el INF de DP
absolute perel
INF DPObj
absolute perel
INF DPSubj
absolute pertotal
absolute
ury numbers centage numbers centage numbers centage numbers
12 30 77 3 8 6 15 39
13 19 100 0 0 0 0 19
14 167 93 7 4 5 3 179
15 196 59 76 23 60 18 332
16 45 16 114 42 114 42 273
17 66 46 69 48 10 7 145
18 541 87 60 10 18 3 619
19 437 65 226 34 6 1 669
total 1501 66 555 24 219 10 2275
• Nominal infinitive with subject is rare in modern Spanish.
• Nominal infinitives with oblique complement and nominal infinitive with direct object
are frequent in the modern language.
Hypothesis
• Nominal infinitives with direct object and nominal infinitives with subject belong to
one single construction
• They share all properties (distributional and interpretational); the only difference is the
absence vs. presence of an overt subject
o Nominal infinitives with direct object, but without overt subject always have
an implicit subject, see (50)
• They occur with similar frequency in old Spanish and in early modern Spanish
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