This article exposes the existence of semantic restrictions to alternations in the Spanish dative which lay out some boundaries for two concepts developed in the context of contemporary studies about the interpretation of the Spanish dative construction: the notions of comprehensive relation (Romero Morales, 2008) and genetic relation (Gutiérrez Ordóñez, 1999). The first notion takes on the semantic relations that license these constructions and the second one tries to explain how its meaning is determined taking as a basis the meaning of other sentences with fully prepositional complements. The aforementioned limitations to these concepts are exposed basing the analysis on examples that include verbs belonging to two classes of the Spanish dative: the ones belonging to the class of material transference and the ones belonging to the class of physical movement, according to Delbecque y Lamiroy’s (1996) typology. The results of these analyses show that the descriptive adequacy of these relations can be restricted by the lexical requisites of the verb in combination with the semantic potential of the dative construction in Spanish.
Keywords:
dative construction, Spanish semantics, prepositions, alternations, verb meaning
Saavedra Garretón, N. (2017). The semantics of the Spanish Dative Construction: Some restrictions on the alternation with prepositional complements. Boletín De Filología, 52(1), pp. 273–298. Retrieved from https://revistaliteratura.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/47586
Twitter