Ambitransitive verbs, semantic and discursive properties
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32870/vel.vi19.179Keywords:
Ambicalance, Transitivity, Syntactic valency, Semantic-discursive, SyntaxAbstract
The following article deals with ambitransitive properties of Spanish verbs in search of explaining why certain verbs can appear without a direct object. In order to do so, a corpus of 50 verbs was examined, 25 of which were strictly transitive, while the 25-remaining presented ambitransitive properties. With the purpose of substantiating the syntactic valency of our verbs, examples of constructions containing the abovementioned verbs were searched within two Spanish corpus: the Diachronic Spanish Corpus (CORDE, by its acronym in Spanish) and the Current Spanish Reference Corpus (CREA, by its acronym in Spanish). The analysis was made through two theories regarding verbal ambivalence, the constructionist-discursive theory (Cano Aguilar, 1981) and the lexical-semantic proprieties of verbs theory (Levin, 1993). Our study led us to find that verbal ambivalence is not a purely syntactic property but a lexical-semantic phenomenon, which also includes discursive and pragmatic functions.
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