On the Development of Stative Biactancial Constructions in Spanish
Keywords:
argument structure, stativity, impersonal constructions, constructions, Old SpanishAbstract
Similarly to other Romance languages and even some Germanic languages, medieval Spanish developed a type of specialized biactancial construction containing an indirect object (or dative) which was chiefly used with stative verbs expressing experience, modality, convenience and other related semantic areas. These constructions are rooted in Latin impersonal structures, which survived into the Middle Ages. Their syntactic structure is similar to that of transitive constructions, with the distribution of their arguments reversed. Therefore, it seems reasonable to consider them ergative constructions which are directly opposed to transitive structures.
This new stative construction acquired remarkable productivity in Spanish in comparison with previous impersonal structures in Latin or medieval Spanish, and attracted a considerable amount of verbs largely varying in origin and meaning, many of which alternated their stative use by occurring in other different constructions. On account of the recent conception of construction as the association of syntactic structure with an abstract meaning, I provide several arguments in favor of considering stativity as an abstract meaning typically associated with biactantial constructions.
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