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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. 305–324

Two types of transitive verbs in Spanish

Ditransitives in disguise

| Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

This paper focuses on the different properties shown by two types of verbs that surface as transitive verbs in Spanish. The article tries to demonstrate that, beside regular transitive verbs taking a DP complement (e.g. Juan leyó un libro ‘Juan read a book’), other apparent transitive verbs – pseudotransitive verbs – (e.g. Juan golpeó al prisionero ‘Juan hit the prisoner’) hide a deep ditransitive structure in which a nominal argument is conflated into an abstract predicate. Subextraction, nominalization and quantifier scope data are used to support this claim. The analysis derives the different properties exhibited by these two types of verbs from their base argument structure and shows that they are independent from other syntactic mechanisms such as differential object marking.

Keywords: transitive verb, conflation, small clause, differential object marking, abstract predicate
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data
    • 2.1Case marking of objects in nominalization
    • 2.2Objects as relational adjectives
    • 2.3Quantifier scope
    • 2.4Sub-extraction from the object
    • 2.5Misleading evidence: Compatibility with datives and secondary predicates
  • 3.Ditransitive verbs in disguise
    • 3.1PTVs as underlying ditransitive verbs
    • 3.2Explaining the data
    • 3.3Transitive verbs and DOM
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.239.14fer
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