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Part of
Corpus-based Approaches to Construction Grammar
Edited by Jiyoung Yoon and Stefan Th. Gries
[Constructional Approaches to Language 19] 2016
► pp. 105–144

Spanish constructions of directed motion – a quantitative study

Typological variation and framing strategy

In typological studies of expressions of motion events, there is a need for a quantitative methodology that assesses and qualifies inter- and intra-linguistic variation. The article reports on a large corpus study of the use of Spanish motion verbs in constructions of telic motion. Verb associations with the constructional V-slot were measured by using collostructional methodology (Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2003). Six categories of construction-specific variation were identified. The corpus data and broad evidence from other semantic domains suggest that the encoding of Spanish argument structure is verb-driven and that verb constraints versus schematicity is a typological parameter. The study concludes that Spanish is a verb-framing language rather than a verbframed language (cf. Talmy, 2000), which explains the substantial variation observed.

Published online: 8 September 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.19.05ped
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