What Spanish can tell us about the syntax of eventives vs. stative verbal predicates

Jonathan E. McDonald

doi:10.7557/1.13.1.7448

Authors

Jonathan E. McDonald University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/1.13.1.7448

Keywords:

eventives, statives, syntax-semantics interface, hacerlo, interfixes

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to argue and provide support for the distinction between eventive and stative verbal predicates being encoded in the syntax. More specifically, following Travis (1991, 2010, MacDonald 2008, Kardos & Farkas 2022), I provide arguments for the existence of an aspectual functional projection situated between Voice and VP: AspP. I argue that eventive verbal predicates project AspP and stative verbal predicates do not. Its syntactic presence serves as input to semantics giving rise to a dynamic predicate, a predicate that entails (some amount of) change along a scale, based on scalar approaches to eventive verbal predicates (Hay et al. 1999, Kennedy & Levin 2008, Beavers 2011, 2013, among others). Empirically, I discuss two phenomena from Spanish: hacerlo "do so" substitution and verbal interfixes, like ot in fregotear "to scrub at" (vs. fregar "to scrub"). I argue that hacer selects for AspP while the verbal interfixes head Asp. Support for the main proposal that there is a syntactic distinction between eventives and statives emerges from the ungrammaticality of hacerlo when it takes a stative verbal antecedent and the fact that the output of interfixation does not give rise to stative verbal predicates, only eventive verbal predicates

References

Alonso Ramos, Margarita. 2004. Las construcciones con verbos de apoyo, Madrid: Visor.

Armstrong, Grant. 2013. Agentive reflexive clitics and transitive se constructions in Spanish. Borealis. An international journal of Hispanic linguistics 2.2:81-128. https://doi.org/10.7557/1.2.2.2526

Baker, Mark. 1985. The Mirror Principle and Morphosyntactic Explanation. Linguistic Inquiry 16.3: 373-415.

Basilico, David. 2010. The se clitic and its relationship to paths. Probus 22. 271–302. https://doi.org/10.1515/prbs.2010.010

Beavers, John. 2011. On affectedness. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 29. 335–370. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-011-9124-6

Beavers, John. 2013. Aspectual classes and scales of change. Linguistics 51.4:681-706. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2013-0024

Bennett, Michael. & Barbara. Partee. 1972. Toward the logic of tense and aspect in English. Indiana: Indiana University Linguistics Club.

Bruening, Benjamin. 2019. Passive do so. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 37.1: 1-49. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-018-9408-1

Butt, Miriam. 2003. The light verb jungle. In Aygen, G., Bowern, C., Quinn, C. (Eds.), Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 9. Papers from the GSAS/Dudley House Workshop on Light Verbs, pp. 1--49.

Butt, Miriam & Aditi Lahiri. 2013. Diachronic pertinacity of light verbs. Lingua 135: 7-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.11.006

Carrasco Gutiérrez, Ángeles. 2017. ¿Estados progresivos? Moenia 23: 367-417.

Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. MIT Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by Phase. In M. Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A Life in Language, 1-52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/4056.003.0004

De Miguel, Elena. 1999. El aspecto léxico. In Bosque, Ignacio, & Demonte, Violeta (eds), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, vol. 2, ch. 46. Madrid: Espasa

Di Tullio, Ángela Lucía. 1997. Verbos de sufijación homogénea en español. Revista de Lengua y Literatura 17.22: 47-58.

den Dikken, Marcel. 1995. Particles: On the Syntax of Verb-particle, Triadic, and Causative Constructions. Oxford University Press, New York. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195091342.001.0001

De Swart, Henriëtte. 1998. Aspect shift and coercion. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 16: 347-385. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005916004600

Diesing, Molly. 1998. Light verbs and the syntax of aspect in Yiddish. The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 1.2: 119-156. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009751908064

Dowty, David. 1979. Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Reidel, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9473-7

Fábregas, Antonio. 2017. Theme vowels are verbs. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 5.

Fábregas, Antonio. 2022. Lexical aspect in Spanish: contrasts, syntactic structures and semantic interpretations. Borealis. An international Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 11: 1-191. https://doi.org/10.7557/1.11.3.6692

Fábregas, Antonio. 2024. The Fine-grained Structure of the Lexical Area. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.39

Filip, Hana. 2008. Events and maximalization: The case of telicity and perfectivity. In Susan Rothstein (ed.), Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect, 217–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.110.10fil

Filip, Hana & Susan Rothstein. 2005. Telicity as a semantic parameter. In James Lavine, Steven Franks, Hana Filip & Mila Tasseva-Kurktchieva (eds.), Formal approaches to Slavic linguistics XIV, 139–156. Ann Harbor, MI: University of Michigan Slavic Publications.

Folli, Raffaella & Heidi Harley. 2007. Causation, obligation and argument structure: On the nature of little v. Linguistic Inquiry 38.2, 197–238. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2007.38.2.197

Folli, Raffaella & Heidi Harley. 2013. The syntax of argument structure: Evidence from Italian complex predicates. Journal of Linguistics 49: 93-125. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226712000072

García-Pardo, Alfredo. 2020. Stative inquiries: Causes, results, experiences, and locations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.264

Gibert-Sotelo, Elisabeth. & Marín, Rafael. 2024. Argument structure and the eventive-stative alternation in extent verbs. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 9(1). pp. 1–44. https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.9522

Hallman, Peter. 2004. Constituency and agency in VF. InVineeta Chand, Ann Kelleher, Angelo J. Rodriguez, and Benjamin Schmeiser (eds.), West Coast Conference on formal Linguistics (WCCFL) 23, 304-317. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.

Harley, Heidi. 2013. External arguments and the Mirror Principle: On the distinctness of Voice and v. Lingua 125, 34-57. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2012.09.010

Hay, Jennifer, Christopher Kennedy, and Beth Levin. 1999. Scalar Structure Underlies Telicity in “Degree Achievements”. In Proceedings of SALT IX T. Mathews and D. Strolovitch (eds), 127-144. Ithaca, New York: CLC Publications. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v9i0.2833

Houser, Michael John. 2010. The syntax and semantics of do so anaphora. PhD Dissertation UC Berkeley.

Kardos, Éva & Imola-Ágnes Farkas. 2022. The syntax of inner aspect in Hungarian. First View article in the Journal of Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226721000426

Kennedy, Christopher 1997. Projecting the adjective: The syntax and semantics of gradability and comparison. PhD Dissertation, UC Santa Cruz.

Kennedy, Christopher & Beth Levin. 2008. Measure of change: The adjectival core of degree achievements. In Louise McNally & Christopher Kennedy (eds.), Adjectives and adverbs: Syntax, semantics, and discourse, 156–182. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199211616.003.0007

Kennedy, Christopher & Louise McNally. 2005. Scale structure, degree modification, and the semantics of gradable predicates. Language 81. 345–381. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2005.0071

Kitahara, Hisatsugu. 1997. Elementary operations and optimal derivations. MIT Press.

Lakoff, George & J.R. Ross.1966. Criterion for verb phrase constituency. In Mathematical linguistics and automatic translation. .ed. A. G. Oetting, 1-11. Cambridge: Harvard Computational Laboratory

MacDonald, Jonathan. E. 2008. Domain of aspectual interpretation. Linguistic Inquiry 38(1): 128-147. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2008.39.1.128

MacDonald, Jonathan. E. 2017. Spanish aspectual se as an indirect object reflexive: evidence from (a)telicity, bare nouns and leísta PCC repairs. Probus 29.1:73-117. https://doi.org/10.1515/probus-2015-0009

Maienborn, Claudia. 2005. On the limits of the Davidsonian approach: The case of copula sentences. Theoretical Linguistics 31(3): 275-316. https://doi.org/10.1515/thli.2005.31.3.275

Marín, Rafael. 2022. Los mejores diagnósticos sobre estados reunidos. Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistic.11.3: 229-246. https://doi.org/10.7557/1.11.3.6774

Miller, Philip. 2013. Usage preferences: The case of the English verbal anaphor do so. In 20th International Conference of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), ed. Stefan Müller, 121-139. Stanford: CSLI Publications. https://doi.org/10.21248/hpsg.2013.7

Moliner, María. 1998. Diccionario de uso del español. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Second Edition.

Nishida, Chiyo. 1994. The Spanish reflexive clitic se as an aspectual class marker. Linguistics 32. 425–458. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1994.32.3.425

Parson, Terrence. 1990. Events in the Semantics of English. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Portolés, José. 1999. La interfijación. In I. Bosque & V. Demonte (dirs.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa, pp. 5041-5075.

Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. First Phase Syntax. Cambridge University Press.

Ramchand, Gillian. 2014. On structural meaning vs. conceptual meaning in verb semantics. Linguistic Analysis 39: 207-243.

Ramchand, Gillian. 2018. Situations and Syntactic Structures. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262037754.001.0001

Ramchand, Gillian. & Peter. Svenonius. 2014. Deriving the functional hierarchy. Langue Sciences 46:152-174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.06.013

Rothmayr, Antonia. 2009. The structure of stative verbs. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.143

Rothstein, Susan. 2004. Structuring Events: A Study in the Semantics of Lexical Aspect. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470759127

Solà, Jaume. 1994. Morphology and word order in Germanic languages. In Werner Abraham (ed.), Minimal ideas: syntactic studies in the minimalist framework, 217–251. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. https://doi.org/10.1075/la.12.12sol

Stroik, Thomas. 2001. On the light verb hypothesis. Linguistic Inquiry 32.2: 362-369. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2001.32.2.362

Tenny, Carol. 1994. Aspectual roles and the syntax-semantic interface . Dordrecht: Kluwer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1150-8

Travis, Lisa. 1991. Inner aspect and the structure of VP. Ms., McGill University.

Travis, Lisa. 2010. Inner Aspect: the articulation of VP. Dordrecht: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8550-4

Vendler, Zeno. 1957. Verbs and times. The Philosophical Review 66. 143–160.

Zagona, Karen. 1996. Compositionality of Aspect: Evidence from Spanish Aspectual Se. In C. Parodi, C. Quicoli, M. Saltarelli, and M.L. Zubizarreta (eds). Aspects of Romance Linguistics. Georgetown UP: Washington DC: 475-488

Zagona, Karen. 2002. The syntax of Spanish. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613234

Zagona, Karen. 2012. Tense and Aspect. In José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke (eds.), The handbook of Hispanic linguistics, 355-372. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118228098.ch18