Cuantificación y recategorización incontable en nombres de personas: un análisis desde la Morfología Distribuida.

Abstract

It is well known that the noun or name, as a grammatical macrocategory, is subject to numerous subclassifications. Whether in descriptive grammars (RAE 1999, RAE-ASALE 2009) or in pedagogical grammars (Gómez Torrego 2002), oppositions have been drawn according to their formal or semantic characteristics: common vs. proper; abstract vs. concrete; animate vs. inanimate; human vs. nonhuman; variable gender vs. inherent gender; variable number vs. inherent number; countable vs. uncountable, among others. In this paper, we are interested in analyzing the process by which a personal name is recategorized as uncountable—also as 'of mass,' 'of matter,' or 'continuous'—from a countable noun—or 'discrete' or 'discontinuous'. The interesting thing about the recategorization process from countable to uncountable is that, with rare exceptions, it is unusual to find uncountable nouns denoting people (cf. The People, the Staff, the Public, the Crowd), unlike those denoting substances or foods, which make up an ostensibly larger group (cf. Wine, Gold, Sand, Meat, Water, Air, Smoke, Rain, Peace, Gasoline, Love, Rice, Cotton, etc.). Similarly, the reverse process, i.e., from uncountable to countable, has received much more attention in the tradition of grammatical studies, since the language presents numerous lexical procedures for "parceling" mass nouns and recategorizing them into countable nouns (see Chapter 3, §3). On the contrary, the recategorization process from countable to uncountable (hereafter countable → uncountable) in personal nouns seems to be more closely linked to a syntactical procedure. In this sense, the purpose of this thesis is to formally describe and analyze, through the guidelines of the theoretical framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, Marantz 1997, Harley and Noyer 1999, Embick and Noyer 2001, among others), the process by which it is possible in Spanish to obtain structures in which a personal name, which a priori is defined as countable, begins to operate as uncountable in a syntagmatic construction composed of a quantifier that precedes it.