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This paper focuses on a group of Spanish emotion verbs, such as asustar 'to frighten' or asombrar 'to amaze', that takes as grammatical subject the cause which triggers the emotion and as first verbal object the experiencer (El violador asusta a las madres 'The rapist frightens the mothers'). Most of these verbs present an alternance in their superficial syntactic structure in such a way that the referred first verbal object can be interpreted as DO (El violador las asusta 'The rapist frightens them') or as IO (A las madres les asusta el violador 'The mothers are afraid of the rapist'). The goal of this paper is to ascertain whether these two syntactic expressions entail also differences in meaning and whether these differences are important enough to distinguish two lexical units within a polysemous word (lexical ambiguity) or, on the contrary, they can be covered by the same definition (lexical vagueness). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The six particles dis–, ex–, abs–, de, des–and desde constitute the relational subsystem of the “movement of separation” with heterogeneous vitality and profitability in Spanish language. This paper analyzes the issue of invariant signification in each of those particles, the senses they develop in preverbal or compositional position and the degree of vitality they show in contemporary speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical review of the so-called Verbal Government Complement (VGC), arguing, with Demonte, that two types of VGCs must be distinguished: the insist type, and the consist type. An analysis will be proposed according to which the former is formed by a small clause selected by a light verb (which explains their obligatory presence, e.g., The exam consists *(offive questions)), the latter being a variety of adjunct (in particular, a "lexical adjunct", in Mateu's sense, which will explain the possibility to suppress them: The witness insisted (that he is innocent)). Besides providing additional evidence to differentiate two types of VGCs, the analysis has the more general goal of discussing the traditional distinction between arguments (participants obligatorily selected) and adjuncts (or circumstantial complements). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work studies three 'denominal' verbs which has been classified as 'agentive': protagonizar, fiscalizar and tiranizar. The paper examines the relationship between the nominal bases and the meaning of these verbs. It also analyses some of their syntactic and semantic properties: the semantic role of their arguments, their participation in diathesis alternations, some of their aspectual characteristics. The analysis allows to conclude that fiscalizar and tiranizar are 'activity' verbs with a 'similative' meaning, but protagonizar differs from them in many ways. This verb does not seem to be specified with respect to 'agency' or 'activity', and the (sub)lexical, encyclopedic or 'frame' properties of its complements are clearly relevant for the semantic composition of the sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper it will be pointed out that the infinitive constructions with perception and causative verbs in Spanish are double object sentences in which each object has a different degree of transitive prototypicity. Functionally, they are to some extent unstable structures which have to hold balance between three different forces: subject, object and infinitive, with a different way of interaction depending on the eventive structure of the sentence and the verb type. After studying separately perception and causative verbs, a tentative explanation of both verb types in terms of diathesis will be offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the Spanish verb tener 'to have' when used in a collocation co-occurring with an emotion noun (tener miedo 'to be afraid'). From the semantic viewpoint, tener is a quasi-empty verb; from the syntactic one, it is construed with two diathesis: one with three syntactic actants (Todos le tenían respeto 'Everyone had respect towards him/her'), the other, with only two (Tuve una profunda emoción 'I felt a deep emotion'). Most of the emotion nouns go either with the former or with the latter diathesis, and only a small group combines with both of them (La gente tiene miedo a la Policía/La gente tiene miedo (de la Policía) 'People are afraid of the Police'). The objective will be to find evidence of tener as an aspectual marker through the use of this double diathesis. The results will be applied in the elaboration of lexical entries for collocates in the Diccionario de colocaciones del español. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]