The Interplay of Synonymy and Polysemy

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Pronominal verbs
are verbs that appear with a clitic that usually co-references the 
subject. The clitic, though, cannot usually be replaced by any other clitic without causing a 
change in the meaning of the verb or ungrammaticality. Pronominal uses of verbs are 
normally marked in separate dictionary entries or sub-entry. The following use would classify 
as a pronominal form. 
(18) …el grupo se
LANZÓ
al ataque. 
(CdE:19-F, El domingo fusilan a Januar...) 
the group CL.3
rd
throw. 3
rd
to.the attack 
‘The group went on the attack’ 
The clitic in this type of sentence (18) is usually co-referential with the subject
13
. This 
has lead grammarians to argue that the clitic does not have its normal function of marking a 
direct object. Instead, the clitic is a morpheme that turns the transitive verb into an 
intransitive one (Gómez Torrego 1998:20-21). It is understood as changing a causative event 
into an inchoative one. Under this analysis there is no 
INITIATOR 
and
el grupo
‘the group’ is 
the 
MOVANT
, the element that moves. 
Dividing verbs into pronominal forms and non-pronominal forms is justified in part 
because often the meaning of a pronominal verb differs in important ways from the non-
pronominal verb. For example one can contrast the verb 
ir 
with the pronominal verb 
irse
. The 
first verb means simply ‘to go’, implying direction away from the speaker. The second form 
with the clitic means something more specific: ‘to leave’.
Despite this traditional analysis, I will treat the clitics in sentences such as (18) as 
MOVANTS
. I follow Tuggy’s (1985b) reasoning. The clitic in (18) marks a reflexive; the group 
is moving itself. The fact that reflexives have odd behaviors and sometimes have meaning 
extensions that are highly specific falls out from the fact that you cannot throw yourself in the 
same way that you can throw other things. Stating that the clitic in (18) does not behave like a 
normal reflexive, does not it fact mean that it is not a reflexive clitic. We can take it as an 
example of a non-prototypical clitic. Tuggy (1985b) calls both (17) and (18) examples of 
internal causation: the individual is both the 
INITIATOR
and the 
MOVANT
.
There are examples in the data where the appearance of the clitic is much more 
semantically anomalous. This is especially true with a specific construction that can occur 
with 
echar
.
13
The clitic does not always have to be co-referential with the subject. See §4.3.5 

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(CdE:19-F, Como un guante, como un cal...) 
(19) …se echó a reír ella también… 
CL.3rd threw.3
rd
to laugh.inf she too
‘She too started to laugh’ 
This verbal periphrasis (Lamiroy 1991) involves the preposition 
a
‘at/to’ and a verb in 
the infinitive. The meaning is approximately ‘begin to do V’. As we will see (§4.3.5), some 
of the constructions occur with a clitic, while some do not. I classified the clitics in these 
types of constructions as 
MOVANTS
. This choice was taken in order to give a consistent 
treatment of clitics during the annotation process. Additionally, to the extent that the meaning 
of 
echar 
in these periphrases derives from the central throwing sense, the appearance of a 
clitic can be seen as fulfilling the requirement for a 
MOVANT
. Despite this annotation, I will 
later differentiate uses where the clitic turns a normally agentive action into a self-agentive 
one (Cifuentes Férez 2008:144) such as those shown in (17) and (18), from cases such as (19) 
where the clitic plays another role.
Often the constructions (and meanings) that the 
throw
-verbs can occur in affect the 
types of arguments and participants that they combine with. A few cases are described here. 
The 
throw
-verbs are capable of participating in verbal constructions called