Propositional Gerunds in English and Spanish
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.170Keywords:
Propositional Gerunds, defective category, grammatical feature, parametric variation, English/SpanishAbstract
This paper offers a characterization of Propositional Gerunds in English and Spanish that hinges on the different feature specification of the gerund morpheme in each language. I first propose an analysis of the construction in English as a defective clausal structure (AspP or TP), which can optionally project a [+N] feature in a GerP. Then I justify the same syntactic analysis for Spanish, but in this case the adverbial source of the V-ndo head prevents the projection of this nominal feature. My proposal is that most of the peculiarities of Propositional Gerunds in both languages actually follow from their defective structure and from the feature specification forced by the gerund suffix in each case. Along these lines I contrastively account for the syntactic positions in which a Propositional Gerund may appear, and also for its main structural characteristics, as the morphological Case of its subject or the (im)possibility of temporal/aspectual modification in the construction.Downloads
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