Deverbal Adjectives at the Interface: A Crosslinguistic Investigation into the Morphology, Syntax and Semantics of -ble (Interface Explorations [IE] Book 28)

This volume explores the syntax, semantics, and morphology of -ble adjectives within Distributed Morphology. It presents a decompositional analysis of -ble that captures intralinguistic variation and accounts for morphologically more complex languages. It contributes novel empirical data. First, the grammaticality of -ble formations derived from unergatives and unaccusatives in Spanish is argued to be a function of their exoskeletal properties in interaction with language-specific facts and features of the grammar of cognation, degrees, quantification and Aktionsart. A previously unnoticed correlation between the Spanish data and a cognate configuration with unaccusatives in English reinforces the proposal. Second, the grammaticality of denominal -ble adjectives in Romance and their absence in English relates aspects of the internal structure of -ble to issues pertaining to the eventive properties and syntactico-semantic status of the base nouns. This crosslinguistic proposal implicates central issues in the syntax-semantics-morphology interface, e.g. cross category derivations, locus of variation, or status of impossible words. This volume explores the syntactic, semantic and morphological properties of -ble adjectives from a comparative perspective within Distributed Morphology. The proposal implicates a number of central issues in the syntax-semantics-morphology interface, e.g. cross-category derivations, verb classification, locus of linguistic variation, or status of impossible words. The volume also contributes novel empirical data, which are analyzed in the light of a previously unnoticed correlation between Spanish and English. Isabel Oltra-Massuet, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales - Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CCHS-CSIC), Madrid, Spain Acknowledgements 8 Content 10 List of abbreviations 14 1 Introduction 16 2 -BLE 39 3 Case Study 1: V todo lo Vble 180 4 Case study 2: N-ble 268 5 Conclusions and directions for further research 320 References 334 Index 354