Intransitivity and predication. On verbal government complement and DP (en)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to offer an exhaustive grammatical description supported by a series of lexico-syntactic demonstrations, for a set of constituents which up until now have been described in an imprecise way in studies of Spanish grammar. Specifically, we focus on prepositional phrases introduced by en (in) followed by intransitive verbs such as confiar (to trust). We will argue that such prepositional phrases cannot be considered verbal government complements (arguments), but rather predicates with a «positional» value and selected by the verb. This proposal is supported throughout by a detailed empirical study.