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Viewpointed morphology: A unified account of Spanish verb-complement compounds as fictive interaction structures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 March 2023

ESTHER PASCUAL Open the ORCID record for ESTHER PASCUAL [Opens in a new window]  and
BÁRBARA MARQUETA GRACIA Open the ORCID record for BÁRBARA MARQUETA GRACIA [Opens in a new window]
ESTHER PASCUAL
Affiliation:
Institute of Linguistics, Shanghai International Studies University, 1550 Wenxiang road, Shanghai 201620 China esther_pascual@shisu.edu.cn
BÁRBARA MARQUETA GRACIA
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Hispanic Literatures, University of Zaragoza, C/ San Juan Bosco, 750009 Zaragoza Spain marqueta@unizar.es
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Abstract

Spanish verb-complement (VC) compounds, one of the most common compound types in Spanish, raise interesting questions, because they are inflected, prototypically containing a verb in the third-person singular of the present indicative. This complexity seems paradoxical, given the strong restrictions of Romance languages on word compounding.

Based on a self-compiled corpus of over 1,400 VC compounds, we show that the compound’s verb may display different persons and illocutionary forces. We claim that all Spanish VC compounds can be parsimoniously accounted for as involving a grammaticalized perspective-indexing structure, setting up a non-actual enunciation. We identify three subtypes of nominal VC compounds according to whether they refer to: (i) the fictive addresser of the non-actual enunciation it is composed of (e.g. metomentodo [I+put+myself+into+everything], ‘meddler’), (ii) the fictive addressee (e.g. tentetieso [hold+yourself+upright], ‘tilting doll’), or (iii) the fictive conversational topic (e.g. pintalabios [paints+lips], ‘lipstick’). We further argue that, despite undeniable morphological constraints, Spanish VC compounds involve a similarly complex semantic and morphological structure as English multi-word compounds like ‘wanna-be(s)’, ‘forget-me-not(s)’, or ‘bring-and-buy sale’. This reveals that intersubjectivity can be central to word formation.

Keywords

word formationperspective-indexinggrammaticalizationintersubjectivityconversation frame
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , April 2024 , pp. 399 - 429
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was supported by the following funding bodies: the Hundred Talents Program for the Humanities and Social Sciences (411836); the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) & FEDER (EU) (MOTIV grant PID2021-123302NB-I00); an Aragon Government grant (Grupo Psylex H11-17R); and the Fundación memoria de D. Samuel Solórzano Barruso (FS/13-2020 project ‘Diálogo vivo: Pragmática del discurso directo, gramaticalización de marcadores del discurso y variación de nivel estilístico en lenguas de corpus’, ‘Lively dialogue: Pragmatics of direct speech, grammaticalisaton of discourse markers and stylistic variation in corpus languages’). Sincere thanks to Francisco Rubio Orecilla for comments on an earlier draft of this paper and assistance with the final formatting.

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