Inner and outer prepositions with Spanish verbs of vertical movement

The lexical structure of Spanish displacement verbs is argued to be built up out of prepositions, whether covert or overt, subject to a number of incorporation processes. Some fine-grained semantic distinctions are introduced on the concepts of ‘goal’ and ‘path’. These and other conceptual components (specifically, direction and source) are shown to participate in various configurations involving conflation proceses at the lexical structure of verbs of vertical movement. A relationship is established between redundancy in transitive structures derived from unergative predicates and similarly redundant V-P structures with displacement verbs.