Marie Comer

De verbos de colocación a pseudo-copulativos: procesos de gramaticalización en los cuasi-sinónimos poner/meter y pôr/meter en español y en portugués

Most studies on locative verbs focus on (a) the internal organization of this verbal category and its position within various verb classifications, (b) the syntactic analysis of their arguments, and more particularly the status of the locative complement. The aim of the present paper is to compare the syntax and semantics of the frequently used locative verbs poner and meteresp in Spanish with their Portuguese cognate counterparts por and meterptg. We examine to what extent the use of these near-synonyms goes beyond the basic locative meaning and extends towards other, more grammaticalized, domains. More particularly, on the basis of translation corpus data and comparable corpus data, we empirically analyze the semantic features of their transfer use, their causative/inchoative uses and their (pseudo)-copulative uses, and we shed light on their frequencies. It will be shown that the Spanish verbs present a higher degree of grammaticalization compared to their Portuguese counterparts, and that intralinguistically, poner and por are far more grammaticalized than their near-synonyms meteresp/meterptg.