ON THE ADJECTIVAL COMPONENT OF CHANGE OF STATE VERBS IN SPANISH

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the formal and interpretative properties of a construction in colloquial Spanish in which a change of state verb is repeated by an adjective in the presence of the degree modifier bien (e.g., secarlo bien seco = lit. "dry it good n' dry"). The analysis is presented within the framework of argument structure outlined in Hale and Keyser (2002), in which change of state verbs are decomposed into light verbal heads and adjectival complements. The main claim is that the degree modifier bien ("really") is unique in its capacity to attach to the adjectival subcomponent of change of state verbs. Its presence in that position forces the adjectival complement to be spelled out due to a general ban on stranding adjectival degree modifiers. The proposal provides new evidence in favor of syntactically decomposing verbs into subcomponents that describe different aspects of their meaning and are responsible for how their arguments are licensed/interpreted. Recent research has demonstrated that internal subcomponents of verbs are syntactically active and may be modified (Levinson, 2010). The main contribution of the paper is that there are cases in which internal subcomponents that are modified must be spelled out.