Argument structure of nouns in Catalan : a descriptive approach
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Nowadays most researchers agree on the idea that nouns, like verbs or adjectives, are predicative categories. However, there are also some differences between nouns and verbs, the most relevant of which being related to case assignment. Unlike verbs, nouns seem unable to assign direct case to their arguments. This is crucial for the materialization of argument structure of nouns and nominalizations. Whereas some arguments are identically expressed in verbal and nominal structures (cf. 1a and 2a for the case of Catalan), others show multiple possibilities of variation (1b and 2b): (1) a. Telefonaré a la mare (I will call mum.) b. Odio aquesta gent. (I hate these people.) (2) a. la telefonada a la mare (the call to my mother) b. el meu odi {per/cap a/vers/contra} aquesta gent (my hatred against these people) The aim of this paper is to present a study about the syntactic properties of argument structure of nouns in Catalan. Amongst other things, it will be shown that the realization of NP in Catalan depends basically on three factors: (i) the kind of argument; (ii) the number of expressed arguments in the same phrase, and (iii) the semantic factors involved. Although based on a syntactist approach to argument structure, empiric data will be given so as to provide evidence for the main assumptions, since the analysis has taken into consideration all the occurrences of 200 nouns extracted from the Corpus textual informatitzat de la llengua catalana (CTILC). |
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