The Evolution of Spanish Ver ‘to See’ in Constructions with a Predicate Participle or Adjective
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21236266 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Chantal Melis (0000-0002-3198-8846, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, corresponding author), María Isabel Jiménez Martínez (0000-0001-5232-0725, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Milagros Alfonso Vega (0000-0002-8919-7633, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 13 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-31 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Languages (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/languages11010013 |
| OpenAlex | W7117715136 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 28 |
The focus in this corpus-based study is on a set of Spanish constructions formed with the verb of visual perception, ver ‘to See’, and a predicate adjective or participle. In addition to a clearly recognizable transitive schema, the set includes various instances featuring a reflexive clitic pronoun coreferential with the subject, some of which have been argued to evidence the grammaticalization of lexical ver into a univerbated semicopular verb (pronominal verse), meaning little more than ‘be’ in some examples, and proximate to the intransitive sense of English look in other cases. We trace the evolution of these constructions in data spanning the history of the Spanish language, from its recorded beginnings to the present. We establish the need to distinguish two constructional sources of change, namely, an old middle-reflexive and a younger reflexive passive. We draw attention to the “renewal” of the Latin deponent videri ‘appear, look, seem’, which can be said to have taken place in Spanish as a product of the passive-derived process of grammaticalization undergone by ver. And throughout the paper we address problems of analyzability, attributable to the superficially identical strings of words that characterize the constructional patterns with a reflexive morpheme
Adjective · Clitic · Grammaticalization · Participle · Possessive · Reflexivity · Transitive relation · Verb · Categorization, perception, and language · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
The Handbook of Historical Linguistics
Constructionalization and Constructional Changes
Le verbe latin
Univerbation
Grammaticalization as Conventionalization of Discursively Secondary Status
An inquiry into unidirectionality as a foundational element of grammaticalization
Complement-taking predicates
The Grammaticization of Passive Morphology
The changing functions of competing forms
The Middle Verb vidērī
Roman Reflections
Renewal
A usage-based theory of grammatical status and grammaticalization
| Highly cited | No |
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