The Syntax and Semantics of [muy amigo- possessive] in Spanish

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the syntax and semantics of [muy amigo-possessive] in Spanish. Like predicative nouns and adjectives in the complement position of the copulative verb ser, the string of [muy amigo-possessive] indicates a property of the subject, and at the same time shows a true possessive relationship between the word amigo and the postnominal possessive. To capture these properties structurally, I present an analysis of [muy amigo-possessive] that accounts for the categorial relationship between the word amigo and the postnominal possessive. Specifically, I argue that the word amigo contained in the string of [muy amigo-possessive] undergoes a recategorization from noun to adjective in order to be consistent with categorial selection. From the perspective of Distributed Morphology, I propose that the word amigo, which is introduced as a category-neutral root amig, merges first with a nominalizer to yield the structure of [amigo-possessive], and then merges with a adjectivizer as a process of recategorization to finally produce the structure of [muy [amigo-possessive]]. Under this analysis, categorial selection of the constituents in the string of [muy amigo-possessive] is satisfied in an appropriate way, and the syntactic distribution of each constituent is also explained. Finally, a number of alternatives to the proposed analysis are critically examined.