Verb-based vs. schema-based constructions and their variability: On the Spanish transitive directed-motion construction in a contrastive perspective (original) (raw)

In comparison to English, Spanish constructions of argument structure are highly verb-constrained (e.g., Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Narasimhan, Bhuvana. 2003. Motion events and the lexicon: A case study of Hindi. Lingua 113(2). 123–160): Pedro bajó/*bailó a la playa ‘Pedro went down/danced to the beach’. In some cases, the dominant role of the verbal meaning combines with a mismatching construction (e.g., an intransitive verb in a transitive construction: Pedro bajó las escaleras ‘Pedro went down the stairs’). To account for this evidence from a usage-based point of view, this study examines the Spanish transitive directed-motion construction combining verb lexeme analysis with collexeme corpus analysis (Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction beween words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2). 209–243). ...