On the Status of N-V Verbal Compounds in Catalan
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2003
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
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.