Lability in Western Peninsular Spanish
ISSN: 0039-3193
Year of publication: 2019
Volume: 73
Issue: 2
Pages: 203-247
Type: Article
More publications in: Studia linguistica: A journal of general linguistics
Abstract
The western variety of Peninsular Spanish possesses a type of causative construction in which an intransitive lexeme is used transitively. This phenomenon, called lability, is attested in three specific verbs: caer (‘to fall’), quedar (‘to stay’) and entrar (‘to enter’). As a consequence, they can induce a direct object at the expense of the standard forms tirar (‘to throw’), dejar (‘to leave’) and meter (‘to put in’). Lability has not been studied in depth for Spanish and, with this paper, I attempt to pinpoint its current extension as well as the possible semantic factors that prompt the transitivisation of these verbs.