Morphology, argument structure, and lexical semantics: the case of Spanish auto- and co- prefixation to verbal bases

Abstract

This paper deals with two Spanish prefixation processes, namely auto- and co- prefixation, which affect the participants in the event expressed by the verbal bases to which they apply. From our point of view, these two prefixation processes provide new evidence for the claim that it is necessary to distinguish two levels of lexical representation in the study of the relation between lexical semantics, morphology, and syntax, in the line of Booij (1992), Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995, 1998), and Sadler and Spencer (1998). We will show that only verbs belonging to a specific lexical class can undergo co- prefixation. Therefore, it seems that this process has to be accounted for at the level of lexical semantic structure. As for auto- prefixation, it will be shown that this morphological process can apply to verbs belonging to very different lexical classes. This seems to indicate that auto-prefixation has to be accounted for at the level of argument structure. However, we will show that the existence of an additional semantic restriction governing auto- prefixation makes it necessary to have reference both to a lexical syntactic level of representation like argument structure and to a semantic level of representation like lexical semantic structure.