Los verbos adimensionales: propiedades y consecuencias

Abstract

The goal of this article is the analysis of the empirical properties of change of state verbs which do not specifiy lexically the dimension where change operates – such as aumentar ‘increase’, reducir ‘reduce’, acrecentar ‘increase’ –, and also to examine the theoretical consequences that this class has for our understanding of argument structure, the distinction between light and non-light predicates and the interconnection of structural and conceptual semantics. We will show that these verbs, which we label ‘adimensional predicates’ are sharply different from prototypical change of state verbs, and we argue that their existence supports a distinction between the syntactic structure of a verb of change of state and the conceptual operation that anchors the change to a specific cognitive domain.