A SYNTACTIC APPROACH TO THE SPANISH AL + INFINITIVE CONSTRUCTION.

The paper seeks to study the way in which the interpretation is determined in the Spanish AL + infinitive construction. The reading of these adjuncts can be temporal or causal. Some previous studies (Rigau 1993; Alonso-Ovalle 2002) have attributed the interpretative disparity to purely semantic reasons, while others (Rigau 1995; Hernanz 1999; Martines 2000) have described the phenomenon without delving too deep in the syntactic details that influence the reading. The aim of this analysis is to approach the problem of the interpretation considering facts of syntactic order. I will claim that the reading is fixed depending basically on two factors: 1) the kind of topological relation that is established in each case - in temporal adjunction, the C head selects an IP as its ground; on the contrary, in the causal adjunction the ground is an XP, a projection between IP and CP that blocks temporal identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]