The argumental status of the complement of prepositional regime in Spanish

Abstract

The main aim of the present article is to determine that the complement of prepositional regime may be considered an argumental oblique just as it has been proposed by some authors —like Porto Dapena (1992); Alarcos Llorach (1999) y Cano Aguilar (1999), among others—. Such complement has raised a debate due to the fact that it keeps similarities with the direct object of a transitive verb, as well as with the circumstantial complement or non-argumental oblique, without belonging to either of them. Given the characteristics of the prepositional complement, in this study I will make a syntactic description of the verbs that, in my view, subcategorize a prepositional phrase as a complement, using different syntactic tests so as to demonstrate that such phrase is argumental.