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Part of
Boundaries, Phases and Interfaces: Case studies in honor of Violeta Demonte
Edited by Olga Fernández-Soriano, Elena Castroviejo Miró and Isabel Pérez-Jiménez
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 239] 2017
► pp. 277–304

Spanish participial adjectives and individual-level/stage-level interpretations in nominals

| University of Washington
| University of Washington

This article addresses the well-known restriction on stage-level readings of pre-nominal predicative adjectives in Spanish. We argue that this restriction is due to a structural difference between ‘direct modifiers’ and ‘indirect modifiers’ as has been previously proposed in the literature (Demonte 1999; Cinque 2010). New evidence for such a distinction is introduced, based on the contrasting behavior of two classes of deverbal adjectives: se-inchoatives versus ‘perfective’ participial adjectives.

Keywords: predicative adjective, individual-level adjective, stage-level adjective, Aspect Phrase, copular sentence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Structure of DP and Pre-nominal / post-nominal adjectives
  • 3.Individual-Level and Stage-Level readings of adjectives
  • 4.Participial adjectives
    • 4.1Structure of deverbal participial adjectives
    • 4.2Perfective participles
    • 4.3Inchoative participles
    • 4.4Summary
  • 5.Distribution of inchoative and perfective participial adjectives
    • 5.1Copular sentences
      • 5.1.1Inchoative participles
      • 5.1.2Perfective participles
    • 5.2Pre-nominal (direct) modification
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.239.13zag
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