Reaction object constructions in English and Spanish

Reaction Object Constructions are alternations involving the transitive use of manner of speaking verbs and verbs of signs and gestures (She mumbled her adoration) paraphrased as “express a reaction by V-ing” (Levin 1993). Research on these constructions has been limited to English, often without a...

ver descrição completa

Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Martínez Vázquez, Montserrat
Formato: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2014
País:España
Recursos:Universidad de Valladolid
Repositorio:UVaDOC. Repositorio Documental de la Universidad de Valladolid
OAI Identifier:oai:uvadoc.uva.es:10324/17429
Acesso em linha:http://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/17429
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Filología Inglesa
Descrição
Resumo:Reaction Object Constructions are alternations involving the transitive use of manner of speaking verbs and verbs of signs and gestures (She mumbled her adoration) paraphrased as “express a reaction by V-ing” (Levin 1993). Research on these constructions has been limited to English, often without a thorough discussion of their different elements. A closer look at examples extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English shows a wide variety of verbs and objects used in these constructions to denote different types of reported expressive acts. On the other hand, extensive searches of the Corpus de Referenda del Español Actual have revealed the existence of these conflated constructions in Spanish (Ella murmura su incredulidad), where the verbal event denotes the manner by which the second event - the nominalized expressive act -is produced. The data provided in this paper supports recent claims that Romance languages may use some of these “information-packed” constructions the way Germanic languages do.