En Preceding Direct Objects in Galician: An Indefiniteness Marker?

• Autores: Núria Martí i Girbau
• Localización: Catalan working papers in linguistics, ISSN 1132-256X, Nº 7, 1999, págs. 141-158
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In Galician direct objects of eventive verbs can be introduced by the preposition en. Presence of en signals semantic differences related to aspect and specificity: definite objects preceded by en pattern like bare NPs -and not like the corresponding definite objects without en- in that they required an atelic sentential aspect and are non-specific. Properties of en + DO resemble to some extent those of the partitive article -i.e. French: du, de la, des-, especially at its origin. In this paper I explore the possibility of assigning a similar analysis to both en + DO and partitive article based on Kayne (1994)'s DP hypothesis, according to which D selects a D/PP projection which dominates a predication and one of the components of that predication raises to Spec D/PP. I propose that the head of this D/PP is en or de, and the element that raises to Spec D/PP is a nul quantifier which is generated as the predicate.