2013. "Cobrar miedo: Sobre el uso histórico de cobrar con sustantivos que designan cualidades o estados negativos”. Scriptum Digital 2: 77-106. (original) (raw)

Scriptum Digital, 2013

Abstract

This study examines the historical use of cobrar (both in its modern inchoative sense of ‘gaining’ and its original reiterative meaning of ‘regaining’) with nouns designating negative states or qualities (e. g. cobrar miedo/pesar), a possibility that no longer exists. While reiterative cobrar seemed to be incompatible with negative nouns, inchoative cobrar is documented with such nouns since the 1300s. Apparently, collocations of the type cobrar miedo represent an ephemeral extension of the more established use of cobrar with positive and neutral nouns (e. g. cobrar cariño/fuerza), since they spread between the 1400s and 1500s but gradually disappeared starting in the 1600s, presumably as a result of the extremely low productivity of cobrar with negative nouns, its general decline as an inchoative collocate, and increased competition from other verbs. Together with previous diachronic studies, this paper contributes to the recent debate on the directionality of lexical and semantic selection in collocations.

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