The Exhaustive Lexicalisation Principle

Abstract

In this article I revisit the well-known empirical problem of manner of motion verbs with directional complements in Spanish. I present some data that, to my mind, had not received due attention in previous studies and I show that some manner of motion verbs actually allow directionals with the preposition a, while all of them allow them with prepositions like hacia or hasta. I argue that this pattern is due to a principle that states that every syntactic feature must be identified by lexical insertion, the Exhaustive Lexicalisation Principle. The crucial problem with directional complements is that the Spanish preposition a is locative, in contrast with English to, and, therefore, unable to identify the Path feature. Some verbs license the directional with a because they can lexicalise Path altogether with the verb; all verbs can combine with hasta or hacia because these prepositions lexicalise Path. When neither the verb nor the preposition lexicalise the Path, the construction is ungrammatical.