An aspectual restriction on Spanish nominal infinitives

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of two types of Spanish infinitival constructions headed by a determiner. Firstly, I attempt to define the categorial status of the infinitive morpheme. My hypothesis is that there are two homophonous infinitival morphemes which project two different structures: one of them is inflectional in nature and projects clausal configurations; the other one is derivational in nature and projects nominal structures. This latter suffix carries an activity aspect and attaches only to aspectually compatible verbal stems. The proposed hypothesis allows us to explain the different properties and contexts for the two structures analysed, and, more interestingly, to give an account of a number of data that remained unexplained in previous analyses.