Non-Pronominal Intransitive Verb Variants with Property Interpretation: A Characterization

Abstract

In this paper, we study a syntactic construction that has received little attention in the study of Spanish grammar (La masa de pizza congela perfectamente, ‘Pizza dough freezes perfectly’). It is characterized by the presence of a verb in a non-pronominal intransitive variant, with property interpretation. This construction is related to mediopassive sentences or generic middles (Las camisas de algodón se lavan fácilmente, ‘Cotton shirts wash easily’), as well as to the anticausative construction (La camisa se secó al sol, ‘The shirt dried in the sun’), a relationship that has not always been highlighted in previous studies, which are usually based on a short list of verbs. Taking as a point of departure both the verbal classification found in ADESSE and data from Corpus del Español: Web/Dialects, the construction under study is described, paying special attention to the types of verbs found in it in order to check if they coincide with the verbs found in mediopassive sentences or the anticausative construction. In addition, our study provides new data on the linguistic factors (presence of a manner adverb or other modifiers, negation), as well as on the extralinguistic factors (type of text, geographical distribution) involved in this phenomenon.