On hybrid verb classes: The view from meal verbs in Romance

Abstract This paper analyzes the behavior of meal verbs in Romance, i.e., have lunch/breakfast/dinner , a verb class which we observe shows apparently contradictory behavior in the syntactic diagnostics broadly used to distinguish between unergative and unaccusative verbs. Building on Pineda & Berro's (2020) proposal for Basque, we argue meal verbs in Romance involve a hybrid syntactic structure: their subject is associated with more than one distinct functional head and is therefore thematically interpreted as a hybrid subject since it is assigned both an agent/initiator and a patient/undergoer thematic role. We show our proposal is able to account for the discrepancies attested by meal verbs when subjected to diagnostics that probe for unergative and unaccusative properties and the distinct syntactic properties this verb class exhibits when compared to their equivalents in Old Romance.