Cuantificación y recategorización incontable en nombres de persona. Un análisis desde la Morfología Distribuida

Abstract

The aim of this work is to discuss, analyze, describe, and formalize the process of recategorizing countable human nouns as uncountable in Spanish. The construction we are analyzing consists of a quantifier and a noun (plural for countable reading, singular for uncountable reading): hay muchos argentinos [contable] / hay mucho argentino [incontable]. The main hypothesis is that the countable or uncountable nature of the noun entails a different syntactic distribution in each case: with countable nouns, the quantifier occupies a peripheral position to the noun; with uncountable nouns, the quantifier is a nucleus that selects the noun as a complement. This hypothesis can be verified by the fact that the quantifier is obligatory to ensure the grammaticality of the sentence when the noun is uncountable, whereas it is not with its countable counterpart: hay argentinos / *hay argentino. Epistemologically and methodologically, the guidelines of generative grammar are adopted, specifically Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, among others).