Viewpointed morphology: A unified account of Spanish verb-complement compounds as fictive interaction structures

Pascual, E. ; Marqueta Gracia, B. (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Resumen: Spanish verb-complement (VC) compounds, one of the most common compound types in Spanish, raise interesting questions, because they are inflected, prototypically containing a verb in the third-person singular of the present indicative. This complexity seems paradoxical, given the strong restrictions of Romance languages on word compounding. Based on a self-compiled corpus of over 1,400 VC compounds, we show that the compound’s verb may display different persons and illocutionary forces. We claim that all Spanish VC compounds can be parsimoniously accounted for as involving a grammaticalized perspective-indexing structure, setting up a non-actual enunciation. We identify three subtypes of nominal VC compounds according to whether they refer to: (i) the fictive addresser of the non-actual enunciation it is composed of (e.g. metomentodo [I+put+myself+into+everything], ‘meddler’), (ii) the fictive addressee (e.g. tentetieso [hold+yourself+upright], ‘tilting doll’), or (iii) the fictive conversational topic (e.g. pintalabios [paints+lips], ‘lipstick’). We further argue that, despite undeniable morphological constraints, Spanish VC compounds involve a similarly complex semantic and morphological structure as English multi-word compounds like ‘wanna-be(s)’, ‘forget-me-not(s)’, or ‘bring-and-buy sale’. This reveals that intersubjectivity can be central to word formation.

Idioma: Inglés

DOI: 10.1017/S0022226723000075

Año: 2023

Publicado en: JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS 60, 2 (2023), 399-429
ISSN: 0022-2267

Factor impacto JCR: 0.8 (2023)

Categ. JCR: LINGUISTICS rank: 160 / 296 = 0.541 (2023) - Q3 - T2

Factor impacto CITESCORE: 2.2 - Language and Linguistics (Q1) - Philosophy (Q1) - Linguistics and Language (Q1)

Factor impacto SCIMAGO: 0.638 - Philosophy (Q1) - Linguistics and Language (Q1)

Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/DGA/Psylex H11-17R
Financiación: info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/MICINN-AEI/PID2021-123302NB-I00

Tipo y forma: Artículo (PostPrint)

Área (Departamento): Área Lengua Española (Dpto. Lingüíst.y Liter.Hispán.)