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Verb Classes and Aspect
Edited by Elisa Barrajón López, José Luis Cifuentes Honrubia and Susana Rodríguez Rosique
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 9] 2015
► pp. 357–377

Denominal parasynthesis and inchoativity from both lexical-semantic and aspectual points of view

The present paper deals with a specific verb class: parasynthetic denominal verbs with an inchoative meaning. Analyzing them requires connecting two notions that belong to different linguistic analysis levels: the morphological mechanism of denominal parasynthesis – a particular word formation process starting from a noun – and the semantic notion of inchoativity – which expresses a change of state in the notional subject. This relation is especially productive with affixes such as a- and em-/en-, and with the verbal endings -ar, -ecer and -ear. The aim of this survey is twofold: on the one hand, to show how the study of the conceptualization base in the resulting structure makes it possible to establish different groups of denominal parasynthetic verbs; and, on the other hand, to determine the aspectual characteristics of inchoative denominal parasynthetic verbs so as to try to identify the aspectual class to which they could belong. The outcome is a proposal of characterization and classification that fills the gap concerning inchoative parasynthetic denominal verbs, since they have not been systematically analyzed in Spanish grammars so far.
Keywords: aspect, denominal, inchoativity, morphology, parasynthesis, semantics, verb class
Published online: 25 November 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.9.16mer
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