Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2013: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Amsterdam 2013Edited by Enoch O. Aboh, Jeannette Schaeffer and Petra Sleeman
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 8] 2015
► pp. 261–276
This paper discusses Spanish possessive formation processes within a Distributed Morphology framework. I claim Spanish possessives consist of several morphemes forming an extended syntactic domain; they project from a contentless root taking a pronoun as its complement and are categorized as adjectives. Word formation being subject to general syntactic rules, cyclic Vocabulary Insertion is licensed at word-internal level in their domain, always regulated by a categorizing phasal head. Arguments are provided showing that post-syntactic conditions for root suppletion determine their eventual shape.