2.2 Parameters of constructional variation in inchoative periphrases Constructions are defined as “multifaceted linguistic units that may display simultaneous change at different levels of description – frequency, structure, meaning, and distribution in the linguistic community” (Hilpert, 2013, p. 21). Consequently, in order to comprehend the development of the inchoative construction, we need to trace relevant changes in terms of its form, function, frequency of use, and distribution. Therefore, the starting point for the empirical analysis is that, in order to understand how a construction has developed, it is crucial to observe possible changes in the distribution of different structural and functional variables within a more general schema. These observations can point towards changes in the configuration of a network, such as the creation or decline of particular structures, or an internal reorganization of a network. In concrete, the inchoative construction comprises a set of constructional variants (or “allostructions”, in Cappelle’s 2006 terms) which can be defined along four dimensions: (1) the semantics of the put verb (poner vs. meter); (2) the semantics of the preposition (a vs. en); (3) the internal word order, in particular the placement of adverbial complements; (4) the semantic event type expressed by the construction. Each of these four variables is discussed below. (1) Lexical verb: poner vs. meter. Throughout the analysis, extensive attention is paid to the effect of the lexical source verbs poner and meter on the evolution of individual The two verbs radically differ with regard to their etymological source. Whereas poner derives from Latin pōnĕre, meaning ‘to place’, meter comes from Latin mĭttĕre meaning ‘to send, to throw’. In their etymological dictionary of Spanish, Corominas & Pascual mention that in the Middle Ages, the semantic field of meter extended to encroach on that of locative poner. In present-day Spanish, the two verbs are near-synonymous but have
The quantitative results suggest that: (i) there has been a period of competition between the two structural variants with preposition a and en, both with poner and meter, (ii) the structural variability has mainly disappeared in present-day Spanish, and (iii) the evolution of the constructions with poner and meter has been quite different. The inchoative construction with poner displays a slight predominance of the preposition en in the 13th c. (4 out of 7 cases). From the 15th c. on, we observe a rapid increase in the amount of tokens with a, paralleled with a marginalization and eventual loss of the variants with en. As a consequence, in present-day Spanish the preposition a has generalized as the standard preposition with poner. Yet, the evolution of the prepositions in the constructions with meter, at the right side of Table 3, is rather different. Even in the earliest period of the corpus, the preposition a is the dominant structural variant (95.2%) with meter. The constructions with the preposition en seem to gradually expand and reach a culmination point in the 17th century, at which point examples with en and a are almost equally weighted in the corpus (en = 47.1%; a = 52.9%). Thereafter, frequencies of en start to decrease in favor of a, the preposition which is now used in the most widespread structural variant, just as with poner. However, as opposed to what is observed with poner, a few cases of the inchoativemeter construction with en remain in the contemporary corpus (4.2%) (7) (7) Siempre quise tocar el piano, pero en mi casa no había. […] Un año después, como premio, se metieron en comprar uno, que todavía está en casa de mi madre. (CORPES XXI) ‘I always wanted to play the piano, but in my house there was no piano. […] One year later, as a reward, they decided to buy one (lit. they put themselves in buying one), which is still in the house of my mother.’ Thus as far as the preposition is concerned, there was more structural variation in Medieval (13th c.-15th c.) and Classical (17th c.) Spanish. For poner, this syntactic variability is mostly