Extraction from gerunds and the internal syntax of verbs

Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of transparent gerunds in Spanish, as in ¿Qué llegó [silbando qué] Juan? ‘ What arrived [whistling what] Juan? ’ , using a decomposition of Aktionsart in a series of syntactic heads. A traditional analysis of these secondary predicates as adjuncts would undermine well-established syntactic principles restricting movement and extraction. We argue that these transparent gerunds should be analyzed as syntactic constituents merged as part of the syntactic projections associated with Aktionsart. More precisely, they qualify as RhemePs – assuming Ramchand ’ s First Phase Syntax system – thus allowing their arguments to be extracted. Well-attested differences between Spanish and English gerunds will be explained in our analysis by proposing that the Spanish gerund projects as PathP (given it carries a path preposition), whereas English gerunds are simply RhemeP (lacking any sort of preposition).