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Browsing Senior Theses & Projects by Author "Adelman, Allison"

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    On the Status of N-V Verbal Compounds in Catalan
    (2003) Adelman, Allison; Swingle, Kari
    This thesis investigates the status of verbal N -V compounds in Catalan among three different age groups of bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish in Catalonia. Examples of verbal compounds appear in many articles relating to Catalan morphology and have been analyzed as a productive feature of the language (Gracia and Fullana 1999). However, this type of compound construction is unique to Catalan among Romance languages (Pena 1991 :90). Given that most speakers of Catalan are bilinguals whose second language is either Spanish or French, the construction is therefore potentially unstable. It is important to look at the changes in usage ofthis type of compound between Catalan speakers of different generations to explore whether the productive process ofN-V verbal compounding is gradually weakening as some compounds gain more opaque meanmgs. This study begins with a background on the syntax of Catalan verbal compounds in section 2. Specific collected examples ofN-V verbal compounds are introduced and classified according to their degrees of transparency and opacity in section 3. Section 4 presents the methods of conducting the surveys used to collect speakers' intuitions about the verbal compounds themselves. The results of the surveys are then analyzed and discussed in section 5, focusing on the effects of specific characteristics of the speakers in connection with the degrees of opacity, usage, and productivity of the compounds.