The Interplay of Synonymy and Polysemy

Figure 11
. Meanings expressed by 
throw
-verbs with nonphysical 
MOVANTS
, highlighting 
areas of overlap and non-overlap 
 
S
HED 
L
IGHT
P
RODUCING 
D
ATA
H
ITS
L
OOKS
S
OUNDS
F
ACIAL 
E
XPRESSIONS
V
IOLENCE
P
OLITICS
Ruin 
Reproach 
lanzar 
tirar 
arrojar 
echar 
B
LAME
Bear Burden 

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one semantic class of the ones under discussion. But an exploration of the entire CdE shows 
one example each of 
tirar una mirada 
‘throw a look’ and 
tirar una carcajada 
‘throw a 
laugh’. From that, it seems that 
tirar
can
participate in the 
LOOKS
and 
FACIAL EXPRESSIONS 
schema. As Bosque (2004) notes, there are combinations that to speakers seem entirely 
natural, but still only appear once in a corpus. Figure 11, then, represents what is frequent or 
common (in a corpus) and has little to say conclusively about what is possible or what is 
natural to Spanish speakers. 
4.2.5 Collostructional Analysis 
The 400-sentence corpus already shows some clear tendencies. Each verb is 
polysemous and each verb has its own profile of the types of meanings that it can express. 
The results of the collostructional analysis, as we will see, confirm most of the results from 
the 400-sentence corpora. The collostructional analysis gives a level of attraction between 
each verb and the most frequently occurring nouns for each verb. In this case, the nouns are 
limited to 
MOVANTS
.
The test results allow us to make some tentative claims about the most 
salient meanings of each verb (See §3.2 for a description of this test). 
The results of the collostructional analysis for 
MOVANTS
is shown in table 5.The 
numbers in the table are the p-values. They measure the level of attraction of the noun to the 
MOVANT 
position of the verb. The p-values in red and with a “R” next to them mark 
repulsion; the noun rejects the position of 
MOVANT
. There are only three cases of rejection, 
and it is not clear if anything can be said at this time about these cases of repulsion. The 
empty boxes are cases where the p-value is not statistically significant. The crossed out boxes 
are cases where there was no occurrence in the corpus of that specific verb plus noun 
combination. For example, 
tirar
does not occur with 
vistazo
‘look’ at all in the corpus, but 
there is 1 example of 
mirada
‘look’ combined with 
tirar. 
Neither
 
noun showed attraction or 
repulsion to the verb. 
First of all, it is important to note that the majority of nouns (12 out of 16 nouns) are 
only attracted to one verb. There are five nouns (5E-I, table 5 letters E through I) that are only 
attracted to 
echar
, five (5J-N) attracted to 
lanzar
and two (5O-P) attracted to 
arrojar
. The 
analysis shows no nouns that are only attracted to 
tirar
.
Only four nouns are attracted by more than one verb. The nouns 
piedra 
‘stone’
 
and 
piedras
‘stones’ can be seen as representing the 
THROWING 
schema. The most prototypical 
object that is thrown is a stone. Both 
arrojar
and 
tirar
attract the nouns (5A) 
piedras
‘stones’ 

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and (5B) 
piedra
‘stone’. This lines up well with the corpus result, where we found that these 
verbs had a high preference for expressing acts of prototypical throwing.
Table 5 shows 
lanzar
attracting the plural 
piedras 
‘stones’, but not the singular 
piedra 
‘stone’. In an attempt to confirm this finding, the questionnaire included 1 sentence pair with 
the plural form and 1 sentence pair with the singular form (four sentences in total). The 
questionnaire results do not follow the results shown in the collostructional analysis. In the 
four sentences, almost the same number of participants chose 
lanzar
as the best verb to 
complete the sentence. In three of the sentences 14 respondents wrote 
lanzar
, while in 
another sentence 13 respondents wrote 
lanzar 
(out of the 30 total participants). We can take 
this to mean that 
lanzar 
can combine with both nouns, and the combination is felt as natural 
by speakers, even though the corpus shows a higher occurrence with the plural
. 
We can say 
that 
lanzar
can express prototypical throwing because it can appear with 
piedra(s) 
‘stone(s)’. 
Echar
does not attract either noun. I proposed earlier that 
echar
was different from the 
other verbs in not expressing forcefulness and strength of motion. It is possible to speculate 
that 
echar
is not compatible with 
piedra(s) 
‘stones’ because these are usually thrown with 
strength or to a (relatively) far distance, and this meaning is not compatible with 
echar
.