Syntax and semantics of naming constructions: a resultative account
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24201/clecm.v10i00.247Keywords:
proper names, naming verbs, naming constructions, resultatives, small clause, predication, events, statesAbstract
This paper offers an in-depth formal syntactic and semantic analysis of naming constructions. On one hand, under the Distributed Morphology framework, it presents a neoconstructivist approach to the syntactic and event structure of naming constructions, which treats them as a kind of resultatives. However, this means that a proper name that appears as a secondary predicate of these constructions would have to be interpreted as a state. On the other hand, on the other hand, this paper also accounts for the predictive use of proper names and deals with its intricate compositionally in naming constructions. While Matushansky’s (2008) previous analysis is taken as a starting point, this paper presents data from Spanish that fails to account for. While she considers naming constructions to involve a small clause complement where a proper name must appear, and therefore to be strictly and intrinsically linked to the meaning of proper names, Spanish naming verbs may behave in such a way that is incompatible with these assumptions, allowing just a direct object to appear as complement without a proper name. Consequently, this paper presents an analysis that considers other possible syntactic expressions of their complement, and which unlinks the semantics of proper names from that of naming verbs, while making correct predictions about naming verbs without a small clause.
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