Edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique and Jordi M. Antolí Martínez
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 34] 2023
► pp. 77–98
The objective of this paper is to check whether the secondary meliorative or pejorative senses that the morphological gentilic francés [French] has acquired over time, which are also subject to various circumstances (historical, cultural, social, etc.) have affected the meaning of the verb that has been generated from it: afrancesar/se [to frenchify]. For this purpose, the two syntactic variants that characterize this verb (both the transitive afrancesar and the intransitive afrancesarse) are examined on account of examples extracted from various diachronic and current corpora. These examples are meant to illustrate the notable evolution of the verbal lexeme through the acquisition of the properties represented by the derivational base, which are determined extralinguistically by a shared common knowledge.