Volume 38, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Word structure, meaning, and features: Approaches from Romance and Latin; Guest Editors: Elisabeth Gibert-Sotelo and Isabel Pujol Payet

The interest in morphology and its interaction with the other grammatical components has increased in the last twenty years, with new approaches coming into stage so as to get more accurate analyses of the processes involved in morphological construal. This special issue is a valuable contribution to this field of study. It gathers a selection of five papers from the Morphology and Syntax workshop (University of Girona, July 2017) which, on the basis of Romance and Latin phenomena, discuss word structure and its decomposition into hierarchies of features. Even though the papers share a compositional view of lexical items, they adopt different formal theoretical approaches to the lexicon-syntax interface, thus showing the benefit of bearing in mind the possibilities that each framework provides. This introductory paper serves as a guide for the readers of this special collection and offers an overview of the topics dealt with in each contribution.

This study compares compositional processes involved in syntax on the one hand and word formation on the other hand within the Generative Lexicon framework. It first shows how semantic types incorporated in a structured lexical entry are acted on by different compositional mechanisms in predicates headed by verbs and in modification constructions, and then analyzes non-evaluative suffixation in Spanish in order to determine how the head suffix interacts with the meaning of the base word. It is concluded that different parts of the lexical entry of the selected component (syntactic argument or morphological base) can be accessed in both phrase construction and word formation, but the mechanisms underlying complex syntactic and morphological structures differ in significant ways.

This paper offers a principled account for the nominalizations of dispositional evaluative adjectives. On the descriptive side, the paper shows that (i) in addition to the largely studied deverbal nominalizations, certain deadjectival nominalizations can also refer to events; (ii) the types of adjectives that enable eventive denotation are of a specific sort, namely, those deriving from Dispositional Evaluative Adjectives (e.g., imprudent ). At the theoretical level, this paper argues that (i) dispositional deadjectival nominalizations introduce an event description not in a head but in a specifier position, as their subject of predication; (ii) in order for a word to have functional structure of the sort associated to verbs, an event description is not enough: functional projections must form a head-sequence with the event-descriptive heads; without this configuration, the merge of a fully-fledged verbal functional structure is blocked, which explains the limitations regarding temporal modification; (iii) The event present in the dispositional deadjectival nominalizations is a partial event description consisting of a head referring to the Process subevent.

Prefixed verbs in Latin may take an argument in the dative case, interpreted as the ground of the spatial relation codified by the preverb. This phenomenon is constrained by the semantics of that spatial relation: while preverbs encoding a location, a goal, or a source of motion generally accept the dative argument, preverbs encoding a route do not. I propose a syntactic analysis of this phenomenon, framed within the Spanning framework. I assume an analysis of the spatial dative as an applied argument interpreted as a possessor of the final location of motion. Developing a configurational theory of spatial relations, I show how only the syntax-semantics of the preverbs interpreted as encoding a location, be this final (a goal), initial (a source), or unrelated to motion (a static location), is compatible with the projection of an Appl(icative)P integrating the dative argument. By the same token, pure route preverbs, involving a path but not a location, are correctly predicted to disallow the projection of ApplP, and hence the spatial dative.

In this paper I offer a syntactic approach to the formation of complex denominal verbs in Latin. Two basic types of prefixed locative denominal verbs can be distinguished in this language: location ones “agglutinate” a PP expressing location, whereas locatum ones contain a noun expressing the locatum object. Assuming a syntactic distinction between Incorporation and Conflation in denominal verb formation, I claim that prefixed location verbs are formed via Incorporation (i.e. Internal Merge), whereas prefixed locatum verbs are formed via Conflation (i.e. External Merge). Unprefixed locative verbs can only be interpreted as locatum predicates, but unlike prefixed locatum verbs, they are analyzed as involving a possessive relation and as being formed via incorporation. The present approach also provides an explanation of why Romance locatum verbs, unlike location ones, are not necessarily prefixed. It is also claimed that unprefixed and prefixed locatum verbs in Romance are formed via incorporation rather than via conflation, its reason being related to the typological shift from the presence of a typical conflation pattern in satellite-framed Latin to a lack of it in verb-framed Romance languages. Finally, I show that Latin prefixed denominal verbs and prefixed deadjectival ones are all telic and project a ResultP in syntax. In contrast, this projection can be argued to be absent from unprefixed denominal and deadjectival verbs.

One of the main discussions about the interaction between morphology and syntax revolves around the richness or poverty of features and wherever this richness/poverty is found either in the syntactic structure or the lexical items. A phenomenon subject to this debate has been syncretism, especially in theories that assume late insertion such as Distributed Morphology. This paper delves into the syncretism observed between the first person plural and the third person in the clitic domain in some Spanish dialects. Our analysis will lead to a revision of the distribution of person features and their relationship with plural number, while at the same time it will shed light on other morphological alternations displayed in Spanish dialects; that is, subject-verb unagreement and mesoclisis in imperatives. In order to explain the behavior of the data under discussion, I propose that lexical items are specified for all the relevant features at the moment of insertion, although the values of these features can be neutralized. I argue that the distribution proposed allows for some fundamental generalizations about the vocabulary inventories in Spanish varieties, and shows that the variation pattern exhibits an *ABA effect, i.e., only contiguous cells in a paradigm are syncretic.