1887
Volume 24, Issue 2
  • ISSN 0176-4225
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9714
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

This paper seeks to shed light on the diachronic evolution of collocations by examining structures formed in Modern Spanish with dar “give” plus state nouns (e.g. dar miedo “frighten”, literally, “give fear”). Using the Corpus del español, I offer a quantitative and qualitative analysis of eighteen representative dar miedo-type collocations from the 1200s to the 1900s. The results show that although the basic properties of dar miedo-type structures have remained remarkably stable over the centuries, during the Middle Ages the verb hacer “make” was used here almost as often as dar — a competition apparently inherited from Latin. While different nouns show different patterns of loss of hacer, echoing the lexical diffusion of certain grammatical changes, the 1500s saw a very sharp decline in “make” cases across the board, leading to its complete disappearance from this context by the 1800s. The loss of hacer led to a radical simplification of the collocational properties of state nouns in Spanish vis-à-vis Latin and other Modern Romance varieties. This process resulted both from language-internal factors mostly related to the lexical semantics of dar and hacer and from three key sociolinguistic processes in 16th-century Spanish: koineization, change of norm and increased standardization.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/dia.24.2.02alb
2007-01-01
2025-04-21
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/dia.24.2.02alb
Loading
  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): causative; collocations; give; koine; make; multi-word units; noun predicate; Spanish
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error