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Article published In:
Current trends in analyzing syntactic variation
Edited by Ludovic De Cuypere, Clara Vanderschueren and Gert de Sutter
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 31] 2017
► pp. 273–300

Spanish time constructions with hacer

Gradient judgments and corpus data to solve a syntactic conundrum

| University of the Basque Country | University of Surrey |
The present work studies the grammatical properties of Spanish time constructions involving hacer ‘to make’ from an empirical, quantitative perspective with insights from both competence and language use. The results show a big difference between the properties of the so-called clausal and adverbial constructions, something unnoticed until now. Whereas hacer, in the former, has properties not significantly different from other verbs, in the latter, it shows a strong erosion of its verbal and clausal properties like TAM morphology, negation, time adjunction or word order freedom. This contradicts earlier contributions to the topic and argues against those formal proposals positing a synchronic derivational relation between the two constructions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and interest
  • 2.An overview of Spanish hacer
  • 3.The grammar and semantics of temporal hacer
    • 3.1Two different constructions
    • 3.2Expressed time relations and semantics
  • 4.A competence-based approach to the synchronic properties of the adverbial construction with hacer
  • 5.A usage-based approach to the synchronic properties of hacer+time
    • 5.1Methodology
    • 5.2Results
    • 6.The relationship between the adverbial and clausal constructions
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.00011.her
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Herce, Borja
2017. The diachrony of Spanishhaber/hacer + time. Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:3 ► pp. 276 ff. DOI logo

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