Approaching the puzzle of the adjective

I show a way to solve Borer’s (2013) “puzzle of the adjective”: adjectives behave like derived words regarding some morphological phenomena and like roots regarding others. My key overarching assumption is that adjectives are in fact non-primitive, comprising an adposition and a nominal. Other assumptions, framed within a syntactic approach to morphology, include: a universal recursive hierarchy of lexical categories; the idea that categorizers are simple lexical items relating a span of the categorial hierarchy to an exponent; the assumption that lexically and morphologically conditioned allomorphy is sensitive to stretches of the syntactic representation, rather than to exponents; and a rather flexible lexicalization procedure, one syntactic representation being mappable to different combinations of lexical items

Location and locatum verbs revisited: Evidence from aspect and quantification

In this paper we claim that location and locatum verbs are grammatically different, contrary to some recent analyses (Mateu 2001; 2008; Harley 2005). While aspectual tests are known to distinguish both classes, we adduce new evidence from degree quantification tests pointing in the same direction. In particular, location verbs seem to be change-of-state verbs, and locatum verbs behave rather like degree achievements and unergative verbs of variable telicity. We claim that these differences must be accounted for in the syntactic representation of locative verbs. While location verbs involve an abstract bounded path, articulated through the combination of a Path preposition and a Place preposition, locatum verbs involve an abstract predicative preposition that allows for degree quantification of the root and contextually determined (a)telicity

Argument structure and argument realization

This chapter provides a critical survey of some of the most significant phenomena that show how the study of Romance languages can make a strong contribution to our current theoretical understanding of the principles and empirical generalizations relevant to argument structure and its realization. After defining the notion of argument structure, two different current theoretical approaches to the lexicon–syntax interface are briefly presented: the projectionist one, which is typically adopted in lexicalist frameworks, and the constructivist/neo-constructionist one, which is assumed in non-lexicalist frameworks. The selection of empirical phenomena made in this chapter includes a discussion of the well-known distinction among intransitive verbal predicates (unaccusatives vs unergatives) in the context of Romance linguistics, a review of the crucial role of the Romance clitic se in argument structure and argument realization, a survey of some relevant explorations of events of transferal based on the grammar of dative clitics as well as other aspects of dative-marked arguments in Romance languages, and, finally, a discussion of the prominent place that these languages occupy in the huge literature on Talmy’s lexicalization patterns together with an overview of several refinements made to his initial typology of motion events