"Saying" verbs in Spanish

The aim of this work is to provide a fine-grained semantic description of “saying” verbs in Spanish to try to determine the specific semantic features that permit these verbs to project their argument structure in an ample set of alternative syntactic constructions. The work provides a characterization of this verbal domain in specifc semantic sub-domains through the notion of frame semantics. It is argued that the relevant frame for the description of these verbs’s meaning is Jakobson’s model of communicative functions. It’s claim that these functions play an important role in defining the semantics of the different sub-domains and that they permit the identification of the features that are behind the different constructional patterns of these verbs.

Published online: 21 November 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.105.05iba