Chapter 5 Unexpected Passive Participles from Prepositional Verbs in Catalan
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Abstract
This paper examines the syntactic behaviour of a group of prepositional verbs in Catalan which allow the passivisation of the PP-argument (influir en ‘have influence in’, abusar de ‘abuse of’, col·laborar amb ‘colaborate with’, etc.). In line with Hale and Keyser’s (2000) analysis of English particles (e.g. heat up) as cognate complements of an abstract P, we argue that those prepositional verbs studied here are all cases where the prepositional element specifies the P element that has already incorporated into the verb (“P-cognation”). Following Haugen (2009) in his Late Insertion account for hyponymous objects, we propose that after the incorporation has applied, a preposition with identical abstract features can be inserted into the P head. As for the participle, our hypothesis is that both the passive morpheme (-d-) and the preposition of the verb are heads of the same category, P (Gallego 2010b), and have the same syntactic features (affectedness). Our proposal is that the creation of the participle is prior to the insertion of the preposition, so that once the verb takes the passive suffix, the preposition cannot be inserted, as far as a predicate can only have one cognate object.