Why are there No Locative Conjunctions in Spanish? Articles uri icon

publication date

  • February 2010

start page

  • 103

end page

  • 123

issue

  • 2010

volume

  • 9

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 1695-6885

abstract

  • The main purpose of this paper is to explore why there are no locative subordinating conjunctions in Spanish. As we will see, the absence of this type of conjunctions is due, on the one hand,
    to its lexical-grammatical properties and, on the other hand, to the
    semantic structure of locative expressions. Adverbial subordinating
    conjunctions share properties with both lexical and functional heads.
    They share with complementizers the requirement that they take an
    extended projection of the verb as their complement. At the same time,
    just like lexical categories such as prepositions, they have lexical
    content and are associated with an argument structure. In this sense,
    adverbial subordinating conjunctions can be seen as semantic functions
    which can express several types of relations and take events or states
    as their internal argument. However, the semantic structure of spatial
    expressions must contain a place function that takes as argument a
    conceptual constituent corresponding to the semantic category Thing.
    The reason for the non-existence of locative subordinating conjunctions
    is, then, the incompatibility between categorial and semantic
    requirements in their complement.