Ultimos Posts 1. 19/12/2006 00:31 - When DISSUADE becomes PERSUADE Thanks to mi friend Gustavo Faverón , I discovered a written text (actually, two) where disuadir (to dissuade) is used as if it were persuadir (to persuade): "¿Cómo es posible que siglos de escritura no hayan disuadido a algunos de publicar sólo lo realmente necesario o imprescindible?", se pregunta el narrador de “Fértil sequía”, relato del último libro, El sentido de ... 2. 29/05/2006 22:38 - Is the Anacoluthon grammatical? This is an old question, and it is not by any mean just restricted to Spanish. In general, an anacoluthon happens when a phrase is "out of the sentence," that is, when somebody starts a sentence in a way that leads us to expect certain grammatical resolution, but it concludes in a way that is not consistent with this expectation. It is far more common in the spoken language. Take f... 3. 23/04/2006 09:02 - Unexpected meanings in deverbal nouns Deverbal nouns can selectively absorb and destroy the thematic roles of the verb from which they derive. If the verb destroy asks an agent and a theme (the destructor and what is destroyed), the noun destruction can appear without them: the destruction was terrible . This allows the noun to obtain idiosyncratic meanings. For instance, the English deverbal noun building (as the Span... 4. 26/03/2006 08:24 - Ad Sensum Agreement and Distributive Readings Spanish, as well as other Romances languages (like Rumanian), exhibits an apparently optional agreement in number between subject and verb when the subject is headed by a collective noun: (1) Un grupo de niños cantó en el concierto (2) Un grupo de niños cantaron en el concierto This situation is restricted to this type of nouns, and only happens if the collective noun is in singula... 5. 06/03/2006 03:23 - Free relatives with null head Spanish has a type of free relatives (that is, relative clauses without antecedent) that clearly shows that these structures should be analyzed as containing a null head: (1) Compró el _ que le recomendaste (2) Trajo la _ que le pediste In these cases, the relative particle ( que "˜that"™) has a determiner. Notice that the head can be reconstructed: (3) Compró el auto que le recome... |
