TY - JOUR AU - Gibert-Sotelo, Elisabeth PY - 2018/12/03 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Deriving ablative, privative, and reversative meanings in Catalan and Spanish JF - Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics JA - Borealis VL - 7 IS - 2 SE - Articles DO - 10.7557/1.7.2.4565 UR - https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/borealis/article/view/4565 SP - 161-185 AB - The most productive way to encode ablative, privative, and reversative meanings in current Catalan and Spanish is by means of <em>des</em>- prefixation. This paper investigates how these related values are obtained both from a structural and from a conceptual perspective. To analyze the structural behaviour of these predicates, a new neo-constructionist model is adopted: Nanosyntax, according to which lexical items are syntactic constructs. As for the conceptual content associated to these verbs, it is accounted for by means of a non-canonical approach to the Generative Lexicon Theory developed by Pustejovsky (1995 ff.).The core proposal is that <em>des</em>- prefixed verbs with an ablative, a privative, or a reversative meaning share the same syntactic structure, and that the different interpretation of each semantic class emerges as a consequence of the interactions generated, at a conceptual level, between the <em>Qualia</em> Structure of the verbal root and that of the internal argument of the verb. ER -