ARTICLE
TITLE

The Exhaustive Lexicalisation Principle

SUMMARY

In this article I revisit the well-known empirical problem of manner of motion verbs with directional complements in Spanish. I present some data that, to my mind, had not received due attention in previous studies and I show that some manner of motion verbs actually allow directionals with the preposition a, while all of them allow them with prepositions like hacia or hasta. I argue that this pattern is due to a principle that states that every syntactic feature must be identified by lexical insertion, the Exhaustive Lexicalisation Principle. The crucial problem with directional complements is that the Spanish preposition a is locative, in contrast with English to, and, therefore, unable to identify the Path feature. Some verbs license the directional with a because they can lexicalise Path altogether with the verb; all verbs can combine with hasta or hacia because these prepositions lexicalise Path. When neither the verb nor the preposition lexicalise the Path, the construction is ungrammatical.

 Articles related

Ahmad Imam Muttaqin    

Directional motion verbs construction classify a language into two types: satellite-framed language and verb-framed language. Based on two components: ‘path’ that contained directional meaning, and ‘manner of motion’ that contained the way verbs/somethin... see more


Inna Tolskaya    

This paper is an attempt to unify the polysemous verbal prefixes and prepositions in Russian. At first glance, the variety of possible denotations of a given prefix might appear a chaotic set of idiomatic meanings, e.g., the prefix za- may refer to begin... see more


Marina Pantcheva    

In this paper, I explore the combination possibilities of Bulgarian directional prefixes with various motion verbs. Adopting Ramchand’s (in press) event decomposition, Zwarts’ (2005) vector space semantics for directional prepositions, and drawing on var... see more


Anne Zribi-Hertz,Loïc Jean-Louis    

This article bears on General Locative Marking (GLM), as exemplified in Martinican Creole (MQ): the surface homonymy of phrases denoting Goal, Source and Stative Location. With a few languages as comparative background, we explore in some detail the expr... see more


Agus Subiyanto    

Directed motion expressions have two semantic components : path, which carries a directional meaning, and manner of motion. The semantic component of path can be expressed by using a goal preposition phrase (goal PP) or a directional verb. Based on the l... see more

Revista: Linguistika