A syntactico-semantics analysis of eight verbs of displacement in Spanish

Identifier:  TFG:1547

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TFG1547

Authors:  Sánchez Nieto, Raquel

Abstract:
Tesnière’s classification made in 1959 involved a biggest interest in the realization of comparative studies between verbs of manner motion and verbs of displacement either from the Spanish language or verbs of other non-romance languages, like German or English. By these analyses, linguistics tried to understand more about the linguistic behaviour of these verbs and define their syntactic-semantics characteristics. However, it should be pointed out that linguists have been more interested in the analysis of verbs of manner motion than in the verbs of displacement. Also, it is necessary to say that, generally, they have taken a lexico-cognitive perspective more than a syntactic one to justify the linguistic characteristics of these verbs. In consequence, the aim of this project is to analyse and justify the linguistic behaviour of eight Spanish verbs of displacement, keeping in mind that the linguistic behaviour of a verb is defined by its lexico-syntactic interface. In this project, we analyse the trajectory that is implicit in the predicate of a verb; we discuss syntactic restrictions that each of the eight verbs present and we also analyse their aspectual characteristics to get a general view of the syntactico-semantic regulations that are underlying in these verbs of displacement. In that way, it can be observed that prepositional restrictions partly come from the information that is implicit in the predicate. However, the combination of other syntactic and semantic components is also determining to complete the linguistic behaviour of the verb, and this is a fact that is unnoticed by many native Spanish speakers or students of Spanish.