Unergative Cognate Structures across English and Romance

• Celia Fullana ^[1] ; Georgina Alvarez-Morera ^[1] ; Isabel Oltra-Massuet ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat Rovira i Virgili
• Localización: Moving beyond the pandemic: English and American studies in Spain / coord. por Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María del Carmen Camus Camus, Jesús Ángel González López, 2022, ISBN 978-84-19024-15-2, págs. 65-77
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • We review crosslinguistic variation in English, Catalan and Peninsular Spanish across patterns of unergativity in cognate constructions. On the basis of corpus data checked against native speakers’ judgments, we contribute new empirical evidence that questions the unergative status of verbs like dance, live and sing, traditionally analyzed as unergatives. They further allow us to distinguish between the (non-)argumental condition of English cognate objects constructions (COCs), like smile a beautiful smile, and Romance prepositional cognate constructions (PCCs), like sonrió con una bella sonrisa ‘(he) smiled with a beautiful smile’. It is argued that this research may be taken as supporting evidence to the general characterization of Catalan and Peninsular Spanish as verb-framed languages, and relates their preference for PCCs, over COCs, to their ability to express manner in adjunct position. Results also support the typological characterization of English as a satellite-framed language and its ability to allow cognate objects (COs) to behave like incremental themes, e.g. bake a cake, with aspectual properties to change the telicity of the verb.