On the apparent synonymy between two Spanish agentive suffixes: –dor and –nte

Abstract

We expect with this study to unveil the differences between these deverbal suffixes and to show that there is not any synonymy and the suffixes are semantically and aspectually specified. We adopt a syntactic approach in order to explain the data. That is, derivatives associated with verbal predicates contain functional projections: AspP, VoiceP, vP, etc. (Marantz 1997, Alexiadou 2001, Borer 2005). In this sense, we expect to show that the different semantic-aspectual interpretations may be determined by the presence of different functional projections.