Chapter published in:
Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar
Edited by Evie Coussé, Peter Andersson and Joel Olofsson
[Constructional Approaches to Language 21] 2018
► pp. 107–133

Evaluating grammaticalization and constructional accounts

The development of the inchoative construction with put verbs in Spanish

This article explores the historical development of the inchoative construction in Spanish with the put verbs poner and meter filling the auxiliary verb slot. Previous studies have focused mainly on the syntactic and semantic processes through which full lexical put verbs come to fulfil an auxiliary role in the inchoative periphrasis. The analysis presented in this article aims at going beyond this traditional, grammaticalization account, and examines whether a constructional approach offers a more nuanced account of the empirical data. The main objective is to verify the extent to which different structural patterns of the inchoative construction have given rise to a general constructional schema.
Keywords: inchoative construction, put verbs, Spanish, grammaticalization, diachronic constructional studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Materials and method
    • 2.1Data collection
    • 2.2Parameters of constructional variation in inchoative periphrases
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1General productivity measure: Standardized token frequency over time
    • 3.2Variation in the prepositional slot
    • 3.3Internal word order and placement of adverbials: Syntactic incorporation and unithood
    • 3.4Semantic types
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.21.c5
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