The Interplay of Synonymy and Polysemy

in a fight
that ends up on the ground’ 

---

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In these types of sentences, 
lanzar 
means roughly ‘to begin an action’. DELE defines 
the verb as ‘to begin an action with spirit or without reflection’. VOX defines it as ‘to 
undertake an action abruptly or with decisiveness’. Ignoring for now the manner in which the 
action is undertaken, this is an example of an inchoative phrase. The verb no longer means 
physical motion per se, but the beginning or initiation of an action. I will term this the 
nominal inchoative
27
.
Most of the time, the noun is introduced by the preposition 
a 
‘at/to’ see (193) and 
(194). But there are also three cases where the preposition used is 
en 
‘in/on’ as in (195). All 
the examples also include a 
se-
form clitic. We can propose a nominal inchoative schema for 
lanzar 
that captures these characteristics.
Figure 19
. Nominal Inchoative schema for 
lanzar
. 
 
I still argue that the clitic is a reflexive clitic. Recall that a truly reflexive clitic is part 
of the verbal paradigm and is replaceable by non-co-referential clitics. We can distinguish 
se
-
form clitics which are always co-referential with the subject and cannot be changed to 
another clitic without drastically changing the meaning or resulting in ungrammaticality (see 
§4.2.1) from reflexive clitics that are usually co-referential but can be changed in some cases. 
It is true that in the vast majority of nominal inchoative sentences, the clitic is co-referential 
with the subject. Still, there are cases where the clitic is replaceable by non-co-referential 
clitics. The following is an example taken from the contemporary corpus available by the 
Real Academia Española called CREA.
(CREA, La Vanguardia 1995) 
(196) Sirviéndose de un altavoz los
LANZÓ
al ataque
… 
Helping.oneself of a loudspeaker CL.3
rd
.pl.nonrf launch.3
rd
.sg to.the attack 
‘Using a loudspeaker s/he sent them into attack.’
Sentence (196) shows a clitic that is not co-referential with the subject; the 
INITIATOR
is making someone else begin the attack. This supports the analysis that the clitic in this 
schema is a reflexive clitic, because it can be replaced by other clitics. Still, I have written 
se 
in the schema to capture the fact that the majority of the time the clitic is co-referential. The 
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Infinitival verbs appear in similar syntactic contexts as nouns. Infinitival verbs can be the subject of a 
sentence, they can be modified by adjectives, and appear as the predicate of a copula. For these reasons, 
DIRECTIONALS 
with infinitival verbs can be considered nominals. The choice of terminology is just meant as a 
label to distinguish the 
DIRECTIONALS 
with nouns from those with verbs. 
I
NITIATOR
lanzar 
se 
[