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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 12: Selected papers from the 45th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Campinas, Brazil
Edited by Ruth E.V. Lopes, Juanito Ornelas de Avelar and Sonia M. L. Cyrino
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 12] 2017
► pp. 49–62

Chapter 4
Aktionsart and event modification in Spanish adjectival passives

| University of Southern California

I observe that the Aktionsart of the underlying VP within the participle plays a key role in the (un-)availability of event-related modification in Spanish adjectival passives: telic VPs disallow event-related modifiers, but stative causative VPs allow them. I adopt a temporal syntax framework (Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2000 et seq) for the structure of the VP, and propose that the temporal argument (EV-T) of telic verbs is external to the VP. Adjectivization happens before EV-T projects and thus the event is not spatio-temporally instantiated, effectively barring event-related modification. Stative causatives’ temporal argument is internal to the VP and thus adjectivization cannot prevent its projection.

Keywords: adjectival passives, participles, aspect, event structure, time arguments, Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Aktionsart and event-related modification: The data
  • 3.The proposal
    • 3.1The theoretical background
    • 3.3Severing the EV-T argument from its verb
    • 3.4Apparent counter-examples: Gehrke’s event kinds
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.12.04gar
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