Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Historical Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB

Diachronic change in Spanish ‘liking’ constructions

A case of analogical extension through a multiplicity of source constructions

ORCiD logo with link | Aston University | Indiana University
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Aston University.

Published online: 16 December 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.23031.moj
Abstract
Analyzing quantitative corpus data from the 13th to the 19th centuries, this study applies a usage-based construction grammar approach and an onomasiological approach to the examination of change in argument structure in Spanish verbs of “liking”, focusing on the verb gustar ‘to like.’ This verb went from having a nominative experiencer to having a dative one. I highlight how the semantic properties of the stimuli of liking verbs helped determine the linguistic encoding of the arguments of liking constructions. Furthermore, I argue that a key cause in the change in argument structure of gustar was the analogical extension of the dative-experiencer pattern via a multiplicity of source constructions. This study is the first to consider (a) the verb forms pagarse, ser gusto, and dar gusto and (b) onomasiological profiles for the concept of liking, regarding the change in argument structure of gustar. Results shed light on cross-linguistic variation in argument structures and extend scholarship on the issue of word order in psych-verb constructions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Prior accounts of argument structure change in the Spanish liking verb gustar
  • 3.Langacker’s Empathy Hierarchy
  • 4.Analogy and analogical extension
  • 5.Data
  • 6.Methodology
    • 6.1Applying a usage-based construction grammar approach and an onomasiological approach to change in argument structure
    • 6.2The process
    • 6.3Qualitative analysis and descriptive statistics
  • 7.Results and discussion
    • 7.1Onomasiological profiles
    • 7.2Stimuli of liking verbs: An analysis of their semantic properties
      • 7.2.1Early medieval Spanish
        • 7.2.1.1The 13th century
        • 7.2.1.2The 14th century
        • 7.2.1.3The 13th and 14th centuries together
      • 7.2.2Late medieval Spanish
      • 7.2.3Golden Age Spanish
        • 7.2.3.1The 16th century
        • 7.2.3.2The 17th century or, analogical extension through a multiplicity of source constructions
      • 7.2.4Modern Spanish
        • 7.2.4.1The 18th century
        • 7.2.4.2The 19th century
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (62)
References
Agresti, Alan. 1990. Categorical Data Analysis. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Allen, Cynthia. 1995. Case marking and reanalysis: grammatical relations from old to early modern English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Amaral, Patricia. 2018. Current Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. The Cambridge Handbook of Spanish Linguistics (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics) ed. by Kimberly Geeslin, 582–602. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anthony, Laurence. 2017. AntConc (Version 3.5.0) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from [URL]
Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2006. Predicting the Productivity of Argument Structure Constructions. Berkeley Linguistic Society 32:1.467–478. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. The Development of case in Germanic. The role of Semantic, Pragmatic, and Discourse Factors in the Development of Case ed. by Jóhanna Barðdal & Shobhana Chelliah, 123–159. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Batllori, Montserrat. 2012. Diacronía de los verbos psicológicos: una propuesta de entrada léxica. Historia del léxico: perspectivas de investigación (Vol. 47) ed. by Gloria Clavería, Margarita Freixas, Marta Prat & Joan Torruella, 341–374. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauer, Brigitte. 2000. Archaic Syntax in Indo-European. The Spread of Transitivity in Latin and French. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beardsley, Wilfred. 1921. Infinitive Constructions in Old Spanish. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bencini, Giulia & Adele Goldberg. 2000. The contribution of argument structure constructions to sentence meaning. Journal of Memory and Language 43:4.640–651. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 1988. Morphology as lexical organization. Theoretical morphology: Approaches in modern linguistics ed. by Michael Hammond & Michael Noonan, 119–141. New York, NY: Academic Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1995. Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 10:5.425–455. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan & David Eddington. 2006. A usage-based approach to Spanish verbs of ‘becoming.’ Language 82:2.323–355. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan & Thompson, Sandra. 2000. Three frequency effects in syntax. Berkeley Linguistic Society 231.368–378.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clements, J. Clancy. 2006. Transitivity and Spanish non-anaphoric se. Functional Approaches to Spanish Syntax ed. by J. Clancy Clements & Jiyoung Yoon, 236–264. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corominas, Joan. 1954. Diccionario crítico etimológico de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Gredos.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Smet, Hendrik. 2009. Analyzing reanalysis. Lingua 1191.1728–1755. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Delbecque, Nicole. 1987. Problèmes et méthodes de l’étude de la variation linguistique. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Delicado Cantero, Manuel. 2013. Prepositional clauses in Spanish. A diachronic and comparative syntactic study. Berlin: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dunning, Ted. 1993. Accurate Methods for the Statistics of Surprise and Coincidence. Computational Linguistics 19:1.61–74.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Elvira, Javier. 2006. El desarrollo de la construcción biactancial estativa en español. Revista de Historia de la Lengua Española 11.45–66.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fedriani, Ciara. 2013. The me pudet construction in the history of Latin. The diachronic typology of non-canonical subjects (Vol. 140) ed. by Leonid Kulikov & Ilja Serzant. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (2014). Experiential Constructions in Latin. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fillmore, Charles. 1968. The case for case. Universals in linguistic theory ed. by Emmon Barch & Robert Harms, 1–90. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Geeraerts, Dirk. 2010. Lexical variation in space. Language in space. An international handbook of linguistic variation. Volume 1: Theories and methods ed. by Peter Auer & Jürgen Erich Schmidt, 821–837. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1991. Markedness in grammar: Distributional, communicative and cognitive correlates of syntactic structure. Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” 15:2.335–370.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2003. Constructions: a new theoretical approach to language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7:5.219–224. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. Constructionist approaches. The Oxford handbook of construction grammar ed. by Thomas Hoffmann & Graeme Trousdale, 15–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harris, Alice & Lyle Campbell. 1995. Historical Syntax in Cross-linguistic Perspective. Cambridge/ New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 2001. Non-canonical marking of core arguments in European languages. Typological Studies in Language 461.53–84. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2013. Corpus-based approaches to constructional change. The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar ed. by Thomas Hoffman & Graeme Trousdale, 458–475. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lahousse, Karen & Béatrice Lamiroy. 2012. Word order in French, Spanish and Italian: A grammaticalization account. Folia linguistica 46:2.387–416. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. 2: Descriptive applications. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lapesa, Rafael. 1981. Historia de la lengua española. Novena edición corregida y aumentada. Madrid: Gredos.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Melis, Chantal. 1997. Las emociones, la transitividad y el aspecto. Anuario de Letras. Lingüística y Filología 351.383–415.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. Sobre la historia sintáctica de gustar. Actas del IV Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Española: La Rioja, 1–5 de abril de 1997 ed. by Claudio García, Fabián González, & José Javier Mangado, 295–306. Universidad de la Rioja: Servicio de publicaciones.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1999a. Los verbos placer y pesar en la Edad Media: la expresión ‘impersonal’ de las emociones. El Centro de Lingüística Hispánica y la lengua española. Volumen conmemorativo del 30 aniversario de su fundación ed. by Fulvia Colombo, 87–105. Mexico: UNAM.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1999b. Variación sintáctica con los verbos de emoción. Español Actual 711.49–62.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. Sobre la caída en desuso del verbo placer. Caleidoscopio de estudios coloniales coord. by Beatriz Arias & María Guadalupe Juárez. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Melis, Chantal & Marcela Flores. 2013. On the historical expansion of non-canonically marked ‘subjects’ in Spanish. The diachronic typology of non-canonical subjects (Vol. 140) ed. by Leonid Kulikov & Ilja Serzant, 163–184. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. The dative experiencer of Spanish gustar. Studies in Historical Ibero-Romance Morpho-Syntax ed. by Miriam Bouzouita, Ioanna Sitaridou & Enrique Pato, 123–147. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Miglio, Viola, Stefan Gries, Michael Harris, Eva Wheeler & Raquel Santana-Paixão. 2013. Spanish lo(s)-le(s) Clitic alternations in psych verbs: A multifactorial corpus-based analysis. Selected proceedings of the 16th Hispanic linguistics symposium ed. by Jennifer Cabrelli Amaro, Gillian Lord, Ana de Prada Pérez & Jessi Elana Aaron, 268–278. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mojedano Batel, Andrea. 2020. ‘Liking’ constructions in Spanish: Syntactic category of the stimulus and constructional change. Historical Linguistics 2017 ed. by Bridget Drinka, 81–107. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moore, Robert C. 2004. On log-likelihood-ratios and the significance of rare events. In Proceedings of the 2004 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 333–340. Barcelona, Spain: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rayson, Paul & Roger Garside. 2000. Comparing Corpora using Frequency Profiling. Proceedings of the Workshop Comparing Corpora, held in conjunction with the 38th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2000).Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Real Academia Española. 1959. Gramática de la lengua española, nueva edición, reformada, de 1931. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Speelman, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers & Dirk Geeraerts. 2003. Profile-based linguistic uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties. Computers and the Humanities 371.317–337. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tarr, Frederick Courtney. 1922. Prepositional complementary clauses in Spanish with special reference to the works of Pérez Galdós. Revue Hispanique 561.1–264.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thompson, Sandra & Paul Hopper. 2001. Transitivity, clause structure, and argument structure: Evidence from conversation. Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure ed. by Joan Bybee & Paul Hopper, 27–60. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Touratier, Christian. 2008. Grammaire latine. Paris: Editions Sedes.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vázquez Rozas, Victoria. 2006. Gustar-type verbs. Functional approaches to Spanish syntax: lexical semantics, discourse and transitivity ed. by J. Clancy Clements & Jiyoung Yoon. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vázquez Rozas, Victoria. 2015. Dialogue and epistemic stance: a diachronic analysis of cognitive verb constructions in Spanish. eHumanista/IVITRA 81.577–599.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vázquez Rozas, Victoria & Elena Rivas. 2007. Un análisis construccionista de la diacronía de gustar. Language, Mind, and the Lexicon ed. by Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Carlos Inchaurralde & Jesús Sánchez-García, 143–164. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vergara-Wilson, Damián. 2009. Formulaic Language and Adjective Categories in Eight Centuries of the Spanish Expression of ‘Becoming’ / Quedar(se) + Adj. Albuquerque, NM: The University of New Mexico PhD. dissertation.
. 2014. Categorization and Constructional Change in Spanish Expressions of ‘Becoming.’ Leiden, Netherlands/Boston, MA: Brill Academic Publishers.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wasow, Thomas. 1997. Remarks on grammatical weight. Language Variation and Change 9:1.81–105. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue