Chapter published in:

Verb Valency Changes: Theoretical and typological perspectives
Edited by Albert Álvarez González and Ia Navarro
[Typological Studies in Language 120] 2017
► pp. 32–49

Morphosyntactic defectiveness in complex predicate formation

M. Teresa Espinal | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

This article focuses on verb valency change in complex predicate formation by noun incorporation. I reassess the claim that incorporated nouns and clitics in both Uto-Aztecan and Romance languages are morphosyntactically defective, and I show that crucially morphosyntactic defectiveness, but not semantic prototypicality is a necessary condition in many natural languages in order to identify formally those nominal expressions that are to be interpreted as property-denoting expressions and event predicate modifiers, rather than as canonical syntactic and semantic arguments.

Published online: 30 September 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.120.02esp

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Cited by

Cited by other publications

Mateu, Jaume

2017. In Verb Valency Changes [Typological Studies in Language, 120], ► pp. 52 ff.

Navarro, Ia

2017. In Verb Valency Changes [Typological Studies in Language, 120], ► pp. 108 ff.

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