A minimalist approach to Pseudo-coordination in Spanish

Abstract

The focus of this dissertation is the study of <V and V> complex predicates, known as pseudo-coordination (PseCo), in Spanish. This type of construction has been attested in several language families (Ross, 2017). The main challenge of PseCo in Spanish is the separation between meaning and form, since despite forming a single (complex) predicate nucleus, the two lexical heads have syntactically complex extension (CP). I show that V1 is a lexically impoverished verb or light verb (Butt & Geuder, 2001; Butt, 2010). V1 has a central role in the selection of the external argument (agent or causer). Also, it interacts with the lexical aspect (aktionsart) of the main event by forcing boundedness. Another property of V1 is that they form a closed class, which the literature on the topic has divided into two classes, TAKE and GO. I address the empirical question of whether there is asymmetry between GO and TAKE (Bravo, 2020). I provide an analysis based on Ramchand (2008)'s theory of event structure where V1 indentifies the initiation and process subevent of V2. Underspecification requires a syntactic agreement between the two verbs, in this case, known as tense-copying (Wiklund, 2007). In addition, I analyze the properties of a different PseCo featuring an invariant V1 external to the verbal domain whose main function is to introduce speaker-oriented meanings.