Search

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]

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]