sell · vender

Hierarchy

Same inventory as English sell. Not five-place. Not four sisters of one V. Surface count can name Pat, Chris, a lawnmower, and a price, but the lexicon does not list four co-arguments of √SELL / √VEND-.

$20 = veinte dólares = one MeasureP. Orthography is not extra arity. There is no sixth argument “currency symbol.” See English sell · Hierarchy for the shared arithmetic.

What Group B changes is Case, clitics, and which letter does two jobs. What it does not change is the inventory. Twenty is still not dollars. Dollars is still not a sister of vender. Payment-settled is still implicated, not e2. HAVE of the goods is still e2.

Spanish frames · Case clothes

No English DOC / to-frame ACC flip. Theme stays ACC. Recipient is DAT (le doubling a-PP). Price stays inside por. Cheapness under Neg therefore tracks the goods, not an applied ACC Recipient. There is no Chris was sold a lawnmower twin.

1. ✓ Pat le vendió un cortacésped a Chris.
2. ✓ Pat le vendió un cortacésped a Chris por veinte dólares.
3. ✓ Pat vendió un cortacésped por veinte dólares. Recipient omitted; por-PP may reread as Theme₂ of exchange — still one MeasureP
4. ✓ Pat vendió un cortacésped. Recipient and Price independently omissible
5. ✓ ¿No le vendió un cortacésped a Chris por veinte dólares? canonical NegQ
6. ✓ ¿No fue vendido el cortacésped a Chris por veinte dólares? passive promotes Theme
7. * ¿No fue vendido Chris un cortacésped? no DOC-passive twin
8. * ¿No le vendió veinte dólares el cortacésped? DAT cannot absorb Price
9. * Pat le vendió a Chris por un cortacésped. Recipient ≠ Theme₂

A bare No on the canonical NegQ most readily challenges the event or the goods. Challenging the twenty wants the Price QP already under discussion. That is the opposite of pagar, where the money is ACC and is cheap.

MeasureP WH diagnostics

WH forces Amount ≠ Denomination inside one Case object of por. Verbal WH sees the MeasureP, not unit and degree as two objects of vender. Same MeasureP pattern as English sell and as deduct. LBC survives Neg.

1. ✓ ¿Por cuántos dólares no le vendió Pat el cortacésped a Chris?
2. ✓ ¿Veinte de qué no le vendió el cortacésped?
3. ✓ ¿En qué moneda no le vendió el cortacésped por veinte?
4. ✓ ¿Qué no le vendió a Chris por veinte dólares? qué = goods
5. * ¿Por qué veinte no le vendió el cortacésped? LBC / sortal mismatch (Price remnant)
6. * ¿Para cuántos dólares no le vendió el cortacésped? para ≠ Price

Two constraints conspire on the stars: Left Branch Condition (Amount inside MeasureP; Spanish cannot extract the degree and leave the unit stranded under por), and sortal mismatch under bare qué (qué wants an N or whole DP; veinte is a numeral, not a denomination). Note also that ¿Por qué no le vendió…? reads Reason / why — por qué ≠ Price WH.

Rescues are veinte de qué and en qué moneda — the Group B spelling of English twenty of what / in what currency. The rescue does not make dólares a sister of vendió.

Geometry · vender ≠ intercambiar ≠ pagar

In Pat le vendió un cortacésped a Chris, Chris comes to HAVE the lawnmower. That is give-geometry. DAT Recipient is the spell-out of low Appl_HAVE — the HAVE diagnostic that SWAP lacks.

• ≠ intercambiar / swap. Chris is Recipient HAVE-goods, not Theme₂. intercambiar inverts two Themes under no; vender does not invert goods and money. *¿No le vendió Pat 8.400 USDT a Kim por 0,2 BTC? is only good if the goods really are the USDT.
• ≠ pagar / pay_GIVE. Cloth mismatch under one operator: ¿Cuántos dólares no le pagó? questions ACC money; ¿Por cuántos dólares no le vendió? questions a Price PP. Shared por on the leftover DP is packaging. The clitic gives the heads away: lo tracks the mower on vender; lo / los veinte track the money on pagar.
• Payment-true is implicated, not entailed — the missing default of vender. Goods-HAVE is e2 of vender and the missing default of pagar.

When Recipient is dropped (Pat vendió un cortacésped por veinte dólares), the por-PP can be reread as incoming Incremental Theme of an exchange. That rereading changes the Appl head (HAVE vs SWAP); it does not split veinte from dólares or add a verbal sister for the unit.

Shells, ApplP, and Case

VoiceP  [ Pat
  vP / initP
    ApplP_LOW  [ ChrisDAT   [ Appl_HAVE
      VP  [ √VEND-   [ Theme  un cortacéspedACC ] ] ] ]
    PP_por  [ por  [ MeasureP  [ Amount veinte ] [ N dólares ] ] ] ]

Spanish vender never assigns four structural Cases. Theme is ACC; Recipient is DAT; Price is inside P. The English DOC applied-object slot has no twin — that is why *¿No fue vendido Chris un cortacésped? stays bad and why cheapness under Neg tracks the goods.

Amount is not an Incremental Theme of sell on the give-reading. The lawnmower is. Twenty dollars can measure the sale as a scale without being the object that is incrementally transferred. On a SWAP rereading, the MeasureP becomes the incoming Incremental Theme — still one Theme, still internally Amount + Unit.

Optional high Appl DAT (ethical / affectee) is a different dative from Recipient. Volume 5 splits three datives: Recipient of e_HAVE, high Affectee of the event, FI causee of outer CAUSE. NegQ does not turn the Affectee into a fourth argument of √VEND-. Type A hacer climbing unions Voice domains; Price stays outside the DAT cluster and never climbs as a dative.

Omission does not demote Price to a pure adjunct. High and selected P-layers are optional in the numeration; they are still arguments when present. The diagnostic is participanthood under Case, binding, and WH — not omitability.

Underivables (Spanish)

1. * ¿No fue vendido Chris un cortacésped? no DOC-passive twin
2. * ¿No le vendió veinte dólares el cortacésped? Price ≠ DAT / ACC object
3. * ¿Por qué veinte no le vendió el cortacésped? Amount ≠ denomination N under por
4. * ¿Para cuántos dólares no le vendió el cortacésped? para ≠ Price letter
5. * ¿No le vendió Pat 8.400 USDT a Kim por 0,2 BTC? no SWAP inversion (unless goods really are USDT)
6. * ¿No se vendió Chris un cortacésped por veinte dólares? Recipient is not the se-target
7. * ¿No vendió el mal tiempo un cortacésped a Chris? weather filter survives

Group B packaging · this tick Spanish only

Group B (Spanish, French, Italian) is the Romance Case-cloth contrast set already used for NegQ on sell. Same hierarchy as English; different host of Amount+Denomination and cloth of Recipient (DAT / a-PP, not DOC ACC). This tick is Spanish only. French vendre and Italian vendere share the DOCX and may be briefly pointed; full sense×language pages for those languages are later queue ticks. Group A Japanese is at sell-ja.html; Mandarin at sell-zh.html; Navajo stays deferred.

Open items

• Italian micro-entry. Same Group B geometry; per overload Purpose vs Price by complement type. French is live at sell-fr.html. Deferred IT — do not invent depth this tick.
• Dual-denomination prices (por 8.400 USDT with goods 0,2 BTC). Still one MeasureP with a pair-name unit (LP-token moral), not two Themes / a sixth slot. Same open as English.
• Ethical DAT vs Recipient doubling. ¿No se lo vendió al cliente, el cortacésped, por veinte? Ambiguity is the Group B risk; Volume 5 already splits three datives. Needs controlled elicitation, not invented judgments.
• Sell versus costar / charge_FEE. Circumstance subjects and fee geometry need their own grid; do not reuse this frame. Weather still cannot sell.
• Group A tightness / Navajo. Japanese at sell-ja.html; Mandarin at sell-zh.html; NV scout / predicted, not elicited here.

Corpus filenames

Primary extract for this micro-entry is Group B Romance NegQ on sell. Geometry is shared with the English lexical entry. Chat packaging summary: Tritransitive NegQ Turn 3. Text extract used this tick under /tmp/sell-es-extracts/.