Argument structure and the syntax-morphology interface. A case study in Latin and other languages Víctor Acedo Matellán ADVERTIMENT. La consulta d’aquesta tesi queda condicionada a l’acceptació de les següents condicions d'ús: La difusió d’aquesta tesi per mitjà del servei TDX (www.tdx.cat) ha estat autoritzada pels titulars dels drets de propietat intel·lectual únicament per a usos privats emmarcats en activitats d’investigació i docència. No s’autoritza la seva reproducció amb finalitats de lucre ni la seva difusió i posada a disposició des d’un lloc aliè al servei TDX. No s’autoritza la presentació del seu contingut en una finestra o marc aliè a TDX (framing). Aquesta reserva de drets afecta tant al resum de presentació de la tesi com als seus continguts. En la utilització o cita de parts de la tesi és obligat indicar el nom de la persona autora. ADVERTENCIA. 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A case study in Latin and other languages Víctor Acedo Matellán PhD thesis Supervisor: Dr Jaume Mateu Fontanals Tutor: Dr Joana Rosselló Ximenes Doctorat en Lingüística i Comunicació, bienni 2000-2002 Departament de Lingüística General Facultat de Filologia Universitat de Barcelona December 2010 2 Table of contents TABLE OF CONTENTS..................................................................................................3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...............................................................................................7 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS...........................................................................................9 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND LAYOUT......................................................13 1 Aim and proposal ................................................................................................... 13 2 Methodology ........................................................................................................... 14 2.1 The advantages of a theoretical approach to the grammar of unspoken languages 14 2.2 Data and corpus ...........................................................................................................15 3 Layout of the dissertation...................................................................................... 16 CHAPTER 2 A NEO-CONSTRUCTIONIST PERSPECTIVE ON ARGUMENT STRUCTURE.................................................................................................................19 1 Endo-skeletal versus exo-skeletal approaches to the lexicon-syntax interface. 19 1.1 Properties of the lexical item vs. properties of the structure ...................................19 1.2 A fuzzy frontier: Hale and Keyser, Levin and Rappaport Hovav ..........................24 1.2.1 Hale & Keyser’s theory of lexical syntax...............................................................25 1.2.2 Levin and Rappaport Hovav’s Event Structure Templates ....................................31 1.3 Constructionism and neo-constructionism................................................................32 1.4 Summary.......................................................................................................................37 2 Three neo-constructionist frameworks ................................................................ 37 2.1 Mateu 2002 ...................................................................................................................38 2.1.1 Semantic construal and conceptual content ............................................................38 2.1.2 Argument structure configurations .........................................................................38 2.1.3 Adjectives as non-basic categories .........................................................................39 2.2 Borer 2005b ..................................................................................................................43 2.2.1 Listemes and functional structure. Coercion ..........................................................43 2.2.2 Range assignment to functional categories.............................................................44 2.2.3 Event structure with arguments: range assignment through specifier-head relations 45 2.2.4 Event structure without arguments .........................................................................47 2.3 Distributed Morphology..............................................................................................49 2.3.1 A single generative engine. The Narrow Lexicon ..................................................49 2.3.2 The Vocabulary.......................................................................................................50 2.3.3 Semantic interpretation. The Encyclopaedia ..........................................................51 2.3.4 Operations along the PF-branch .............................................................................52 2.4 Summary.......................................................................................................................53 3 The present framework ......................................................................................... 53 3.1 Argument structure is syntax .....................................................................................54 3.1.1 No l-/s-syntax distinction........................................................................................54 3.1.2 Relational and non-relational elements...................................................................54 3 3.1.3 Argument structure configurations .........................................................................55 3.1.4 Adjunction of roots to functional heads..................................................................57 3.1.5 A small note on case ...............................................................................................59 3.2 The semantics of argument structure: a localist-aspectual approach ....................60 3.2.1 Structural and encyclopaedic semantics .................................................................60 3.2.2 Interpretation of functional heads and arguments...................................................60 3.2.3 Against root ontologies...........................................................................................64 3.2.4 Aspect and argument structure ...............................................................................64 3.2.4.1 Two-component theory of aspect..................................................................................64 3.2.4.2 The computation of situation aspect .............................................................................66 3.2.5 Phase theory and semantic interpretation: locality domains for special meaning ..69 3.3 The syntax-morphophonology interface....................................................................70 3.3.1 Words and structure. Cross-linguistic variation .....................................................70 3.3.2 Vocabulary insertion. Non-uniform insertion.........................................................72 3.3.3 Conflation ...............................................................................................................73 3.3.4 Affixation................................................................................................................77 3.3.5 Operations affecting nodes before Vocabulary Insertion: Lowering and Fusion...78 3.3.6 A cartography of the PF-branch: the timing of morphophonological operations...79 3.4 Summary.......................................................................................................................82 4 Overall summary.................................................................................................... 82 CHAPTER 3 LATIN AS A SATELLITE-FRAMED LANGUAGE........................85 1 Talmy’s (2000) theory of change events and its adaptation to the present framework ..................................................................................................................... 86 1.1 Talmy’s theory of (motion) events..............................................................................86