Cycle BCL – Antonio Fábregas (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) – Prefixes which turn nouns into modifiers

Abstract Under certain conditions, some Spanish prefixes license nominal bases as modifiers.

1. (1) a. depresión post-parto
2. depression post-partum
3. ‘post-partum depression’
4. b. *depresión parto
5. depression partum
6. Intended: ‘partum depression’

The prefixes that can do this are a subset of relational prefixes –those that have properties similar to prepositions–. However, these prefixes are not prepositions, and it can be shown that, among other things, they do not allow oblique case on the base. It can further be shown that such structures are not idioms, that the height at which these prefixes attach is systematically higher than the one of prefixes when they do not turn the noun into a modifier and that only prefixes which denote paths or non-locative relations (time, opposition, etc.) can produce this type of structure. Assuming a Nanosyntactic framework, I use these data to explore the properties of prefixation and investigate how different types of relations are hierarchically ordered. These data initially support the following claims: -* Time, opposition and other non-spatial notions are built in the syntactic tree and are higher than basic place relations. -* Turning a predicate into a modifier requires additional syntactic structure, which is in turn contained within prepositional structure.