Deconstructing Spanish prefixation

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Spanish has three distinct classes of prefixes according to their grammatical category: relational, adjectival and quantifier prefixes. The first are truncated prepositional structures that act as modifiers of any lexical category; the second are truncated adjectival structures that can only modify nouns, and the third are quantifiers that bind a variable, require combination with two predicates at a low syntactic level and only pick nominal categories. I show that each class displays a different set of empirical properties with respect to recursivity and category change, among other aspects of their behaviour, and provide a syntactic and semantic analysis of the structures that they produce.