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Luis Paris and Jean-Pierre Koenig: What Does It Mean to Be a Complement?
This paper shows that the Gerund Phrase (GP) in the Spanish Gerund Construction
(e.g., El jefe entró a su oficina corriendo, lit. The boss entered his office
running ) is sometimes a complement (in SGCC) and sometimes an adjunct (in
SGCA). Although in both cases, the GP expresses a non-argument of the main
lexical verb's denotation, it is a syntactic adjunct in SGCA and a syntactic
dependent of the main clause s head in SGCC. We argue that there is a semantic
correlate of this syntactic difference and propose a general principle that
constrains the semantic relations that can hold between the denotata of heads
and added members of their ARG-ST lists: The two denotata must be part of a
larger macro-event in the sense of Talmy (2000). We further show that the
relation between the events denoted by the gerund and main verbs involves four
semantic conditions and that which subset of those four conditions are
satisfied in a particular SGCC sentence determines what subkind of SGCC is
involved.
Maintained by Stefan Müller
Created: October 15, 2003
Last modified: November 24, 2003
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