The Internal Syntactical Structure of Sufficiency Predicates
Authors
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Antonio Fábregas
Universidad de Tromsø-Universidad Ártica de Noruega
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9907-5878
Abstract
The goal of this article is to delimit and examine the empirical conditions that allow some stative predicates in Spanish, such as bastar ‘be. enough’ and alcanzar ‘reach’, to alternate between a construction where the subject is projected as a nominative and one where the subject receives prepositional marking with con ‘with’. We will conclude that the structures marked with the preposition are instances where the contact of an object with a degreeinterval, which characterises the notion of sufficiency, is explicitly marked through a terminal coincidence preposition; this directly delimits the set of predicates that can have this type of alternation to precisely those denoting sufficiency.Keywords:
verbs of sufficiency, prepositional subjects, arguments introduced by con, light verbs, datives expressing evaluationReferences
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