Verb–object compounds with Spanish dar ‘give’: an emergent gustar ‘like’-type construction

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide a usage-based approach to psychological constructions with dar ‘give’ in Spanish (e.g. me daba vergüenza pedir dinero en casa ‘I was embarrassed to ask for money at home’). Previous studies [Cuervo, Cristina. 2010. Two types of (apparently) ditransitive light verb constructions. In Karlos Arregi, Zsuzsanna Fagyal, Silvina Montrul & Annie Tremblay (eds.), Romance linguistics 2008: Interactions in romance. Selected papers from the 38th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Urbana-Champaign, April 2008, 139–56. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins] analyze these constructions as intransitive gustar ‘like’-type constructions. However, this analysis can only account for 40% of the examples we find in our corpus. Using natural occurring data taken from the oral section of Corpus del español [Davies, Mark. 2002. Corpus del español (100 million words, 1200s–1900s) (http://www.corpusdelespanol.org)] we provide an ‘emic’ or bottom-up approach [Hopper, Paul. 1998. Emergent grammar. In Michael Tomasello (ed.), The new psychology of language: Cognitive and functional approaches to linguistic structure, 155–75. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Erlbaum; Hopper, Paul. 2004. The openness of grammatical constructions. Chicago Linguistic Society 40/2. 153–75] to these constructions by studying their recurrent grammatical patterns. The analysis of the examples we extract from the corpus reveals an emergent construction, namely [indirect object – dar + noun – subject] toward which specific tokens of use are moved. This construction is, however, open-ended, with fuzzy boundaries and constitutes the end-point of a grammaticalization process that is never reached. What we find in the data is a collection of examples that relate to each other through formal and functional resemblances.

KEYWORDS:

• light verb constructions
• dative subject clauses
• psychological verbs
• emergent grammar
• Spanish grammar

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Some authors (e.g. De Miguel 2006) maintain that the argument structure of the construction is determined by both the noun and the verb.

2. Using diachronic evidence and Lehmann's (1995) parameters of grammaticalization, Bustos Plaza (2004) rejects the hypothesis that the light verb undergoes a grammaticalization process in constructions of this type.

3. Among other morphosyntactic properties, Cuervo (2010: 141–44) shows that the indirect object of psychological constructions with dar ‘give’ is also obligatorily doubled on the verb by means of a dative clitic (le in example (8)), and occurs in preverbal position in non-contrastive contexts. The indirect object is also the argument that raises from a complement clause of parecer ‘seem’: Al técnico parecen haberle dado rabia las propuestas “the complaints seemed to have made the coach furious” (Cuervo 2010: 144). In this respect, the indirect object of psychological constructions with dar ‘give’ resembles the indirect object of gustar ‘like’-type constructions.

4. Although first-language acquisition requires that children be exposed to language use, children's experience with language is necessarily incomplete. In spite of that, children are able to acquire their first language because they are genetically equipped with a number of invariant principles and optional parameters which they contrast to the input they receive (Bošković 2013).

5. Excluded from this count are examples of gustar ‘like’ with a prepositional phrase complement preceded by de ‘of’ such as entonces yo … puede decirse que … gusté de la … de lo antiguo “Then I, you can say that … . I liked antiquities” [Corpus del español, Habla culta: Lima] and examples in which gustar ‘like’ only has one argument that is a subject-experiencer: Son cifras reales, que tu puedes cuantificar si gustas “they are real figures, which you can count if you like” [Corpus del español, Entrevista (PAN)].

6. Another possible explanation may be the following: Spanish has (at least) two light verb constructions with these nouns: tener ‘have’ + noun and dar + noun. Only the former requires a preposition after the noun: cf. tener miedo de algo with dar miedo algo ‘to be fearful of something’. Dar miedo de may be regarded as a hybrid construction that arises out of a combination of tener miedo and dar miedo.