The role of determiners in Spanish light verb constructions

Abstract

Light verb constructions such as Sp. hacer una acusación ‘to make an accusation’, dar la enhorabuena ‘to congratulate’, or hacer alusión ‘to refer’ are considered a type of semi-phraseological expressions displaying some syntactic peculiarities which show a certain degree of fixation. Among those, the behavior of the determiner that accompanies the noun (mainly its absence or particular fixation) has been one of the major arguments in emphasizing their phraseological nature. Based on the hypothesis that light verb constructions are closer to regular free expressions than to phraseological ones, the aim of this paper is to prove that most of the so-called irregularities in the manifestation of determiners can be explained by the semantic and lexical features of the noun and the construction itself rather than by structural fixation or the particular idiosyncrasies of these expressions. The examined language is Spanish, and the data have been collected according to the semantic criteria of the membership of the noun to the semantic field ‘communication’ and the co-occurrence of the noun with the light verbs dar ‘to give’ and hacer ‘to make’. As determiners, we study definite and indefinite articles, the absence of the article, and possessive determiners.

Keywords:

• determiners
• light verb constructions
• semi-phraseological expressions
• the absence of the article
• communication nouns

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In addition to LVCs, other terms used are ‘formas descompuestas’ ‘decomposed forms’ (Dubský 1962, 1998), ‘complex predicates’ (Cattell 1984), ‘construcciones verbo-nominales funcionales’ ‘functional verb noun constructions’ (Wotjak 1998), ‘stretched verb constructions’ (Allerton 2002), ‘composite predicates’ (Brinton & Akimoto 1999), ‘expanded predicates’ (Algeo 1995, 2009), ‘phrasal verbs’ (Stein 1991), ‘complex verbal structures’ (Nickel 1968), etc.

2. I use here ‘light verb’ ( = LV), term introduced for the first time in Jespersen (1942:117), while other researchers have used ‘verbes supports’ ‘support verbs’ (Gross 1981; Gross & Valli 1991), ‘verbos funcionales’ ‘functional verbs’ (Koike 2001), ‘verbos de apoyo’ ‘support verb’ (Alonso Ramos 2004; RAE & AALE 2009), ‘thin verbs’ (Allerton 2002), ‘verbos léxico-funcionales’ ‘lexical-functional verbs’ (Solé 1966), ‘verbos vicarios’ ‘substitute verbs’ (Mendívil 1999).

3. For instance, the meaning of hacer las maletas ‘to pack our luggage’ corresponds to the meaning of the noun maletas ‘bags’ plus an additional meaning given by the verb hacer in this context, that is, ‘to pack our things in’, but not ‘to produce, to manufacture’.

4. ‘Zero determiner/article’ and ‘absence of a determiner/article’ will be used here as synonymous.

5. See also Samek-Ludovici (2003) for an explanation of how light verbs and nouns share arguments.

6. The reader can find a study of dar ‘to give’ and hacer ‘to make’ as LVs in co-occurrence with communication nouns in Sanromán Vilas (2014). In addition to the semantic differences (dar as a transference verb, and hacer as a creation verb), dar and hacer are claimed to play a discursive role where hacer is used to express a speech act taking place in the first part of an adjacency pair, while dar expresses a speech act which happens in the second part of an adjacency pair.

7. In our examples dar la bienvenida ‘to welcome’ and dar la enhorabuena ‘to congratulate’ always employ the definite article; dar el pésame ‘to offer one's condolences’ takes the definite article in 93% of all cases and a possessive determiner in 6%; dar las condolencias ‘to offer one's condolences’ takes the definite article in 62% cases and a possessive determiner in 38%.

8. Permiso2. See Section 4.