Towards a unified account of degree achievements and change of location verbs: the case of Spanish verbs with en-

Abstract

This paper discusses Spanish verbs that are prefixed with en-, e.g., en-suciar ‘to dirty’ and en-carcelar ‘to jail’ (the former is a degree achievement and the latter is a change of location verb). The aim of this paper is to make explicit what the parallels between both kinds of verbal predicates are and provide a semantics that captures these parallels. To this end, I propose that the prefix en- has a core meaning, which is based on the locative preposition en in Spanish (which roughly translates in English as ‘in/inside, on’) that can be used in the domain of degrees (in the case of degree achievements) and space (in the case of change of location verbs). My account makes an initial attempt to bridge two different domains focusing on verbal predicates of change. This proposal is, in principle, extensible to (at least) other Romance languages, which display a similar pattern.