Agreement and interpretation of partitive constructions in Spanish: The dual nature of nominal features
-
Isabel Pérez-Jiménez
and
Violeta Demonte
Abstract
This paper analyzes the role of the interaction between syntax and semantics in determining the mixed agreement patterns shown by Spanish partitive constructions when they appear as subjects. These patterns follow straightforwardly from the dual nature of nominal features (concord and index features organized in bundles) and from the assumption that Agree is a feature-valuation process in which the unvalued features of a Probe seek matching parallel valued features of a Goal under locality constraints and a maximization principle. After discussing previous approaches and justifying our syntactic analysis, we demonstrate that interaction for agreement between syntax and semantics is articulated via the nominal index features of the head nouns in the partitive structure, so singular and plural agreement, linked to the valuation/non-valuation of the number index feature, correlates with a group/atomic entity vs. a plurality/distributive reading, respectively, the meaning of the verbal predicate also being relevant. The empirical basis for this analysis is provided by a corpus search whose results are carefully described in the paper.
Funding statement: This research has been supported partly by research projects FFI2012-32886, FFI2014-56968-C4-3-P and FFI2015-63497-P, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), and partly by the Universidad de Alcalá, Spain.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Elena Castroviejo for her invaluable comments and Jennifer Tan, Norberto Moreno, Roberto Mayoral-Hernández and Esther Hernández for their assistance with various tasks related to the preparation of the manuscript. Special thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions which certainly helped to clarify and refine our analysis.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Structural autonomy and aspectual import: A new(er) Spanish Progressive
- Spanish stress and lexical accent across syntactic categories
- The semantics of Spanish Clitic Left Dislocations with epithets
- Negative concord in Quebec French
- Agreement and interpretation of partitive constructions in Spanish: The dual nature of nominal features
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Structural autonomy and aspectual import: A new(er) Spanish Progressive
- Spanish stress and lexical accent across syntactic categories
- The semantics of Spanish Clitic Left Dislocations with epithets
- Negative concord in Quebec French
- Agreement and interpretation of partitive constructions in Spanish: The dual nature of nominal features
