49 |
(CdE:19-F, Memoria sin tiempo)
(2)
Tiró los despojos en el cantero de flores
threw.3
rd
.sg the wastes in the bed of flowers
‘S/he threw the waste in the flowerbed.’
In (2), there is no separate noun or pronoun to indicate
the individual doing the
throwing. Even so, the referent can be picked out because verbal morphology always
indicates the person and number of the subject. Additionally, the referent is usually
mentioned in the surrounding discourse.
The appearance or not of a subject is usually attributed to discourse pragmatics
(NGRAE: §33.5). Since the presence or absence of an overt subject was likely not related to
the
choice of verb, presence or absence of an overt form was not studied. Instead all
sentences were annotated for the animacy of the
INITIATOR
, whether mentioned in the
sentence or not. In two instances, once each with
lanzar
and
tirar
, it was not possible to
determine the exact nature of the
INITIATOR
; in these cases, this slot was marked as unknown.
A second difficulty arose with certain sentences involving a clitic. An example is
shown below:
(3)
Nada
se
tira.
(CdE:19-F, Demasiada historia)
Nothing CL.3
rd
throw.3
rd
.sg
‘Nothing is thrown (out)’
These constructions
are usually called
pasivas reflejas
‘reflexive passives’ (Gómez
Torrego 1998:28). The closest English translation is a passive form. These are sentences
which occur with a
se
-form clitic, where the referent is meant to be indeterminate. The
grammatical subject, marked by verbal agreement, is actually what would normally be the
MOVANT
; in (3)
the subject is
nada
‘nothing’. These sentences, though meant to be
indeterminate in reference, are always understood as being performed by a human. Therefore,
they can be classified as animates, and were marked as such in the study.
The counts from the corpus are
shown in table 1. The results are
significant; with a X-squared of 43.92 and
a df of 3, the p-value is 1.567E-09. The
test on effect size (Cramer’s V =
0.3322048)
shows a medium effect size
(King & Minium 2008:327-329). The variation is significant and can be seen as reflecting
actual differences among the verbs.
Table 1
. Animacy of the I
NITIATOR
Animate
Inanimate
GOF p-
value
arrojar
71 ↓
29 ↑
9.99E-08
echar
95 ↑
5 ↓
0.03486
lanzar
87
12
tirar
98 ↑
1 ↓
0.00087
50 |
There is a relation
between the choice of verb
and the animacy of the
INITIATOR
.
Lanzar
occurs
mostly
with
animate
INITIATORS
, though it has at
least
10%
inanimate
INITIATORS
. Both
echar
and
tirar
reject
inanimate
INITIATORS
, having less than 5
occurrences
each.
Arrojar
contrasts with the others by
having a much higher number of inanimate
INITIATORS
, almost 30%. This can be visualized
in graph 1.
Rozados Vila (1998:283) states that motion verbs generally have animate
INITIATORS
.
The corpus data confirms this: animate
INITIATORS
are by far the most common for all verbs.
This is especially important considering that animacy applies to the different senses that the
verbs express.
In other words, even when the
throw
-verbs express different notions, other
than prototypical throwing, the
INITIATOR
is still preferably animate.
This feature of the
INITIATOR
is maintained across most uses of each verb.
The types of inanimate
INITIATORS
appearing with
arrojar
and
lanzar,
and to a lesser
extent with
echar
,
are similar. One common
INITIATOR
is a body part. This is understood
through metonymy: the body part represents the whole being. The body part mentioned is
usually the one directly related to the action. The body part is an
INITIATOR
since it is capable
of exerting motion: it receives that power from the being.
(4)
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