Verb-based vs. schema-based constructions and their variability: On the Spanish transitive directed-motion construction in a contrastive perspective

Abstract

Abstract In comparison to English, Spanish constructions of argument structure are highly verb-constrained (e.g., Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Narasimhan, Bhuvana. 2003. Motion events and the lexicon: A case study of Hindi. Lingua 113(2). 123–160): Pedro bajó/*bailó a la playa ‘Pedro went down/danced to the beach’. In some cases, the dominant role of the verbal meaning combines with a mismatching construction (e.g., an intransitive verb in a transitive construction: Pedro bajó las escaleras ‘Pedro went down the stairs’). To account for this evidence from a usage-based point of view, this study examines the Spanish transitive directed-motion construction combining verb lexeme analysis with collexeme corpus analysis (Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction beween words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2). 209–243). The analysis shows that in spite of frequent verb-construction mismatches, core components of the verbal meaning correlate closely with the usage of the verb in the transitive construction. The same patterns were not observed in comparable English constructions. Conceptualized in a constructionist framework, this study suggests that verb framing and learned constructional patterns have different roles in the encoding of argument structure in the two languages. This contrastive analysis has a broader application: to other construction types, to other semantic domains, and to other languages. It is argued that compared to the typological distinction between Verb-framed and Satellite-framed languages (Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics, vol. 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), the proposed framework is better suited to account for the crosslinguistic differences and the intra-linguistic variation.