ELENA RUIZ GIL

Universidad de la Rioja

Analysis of the transitive construction in speech verbs

Sintaxis / Sintax

The main purpose of this paper is to make an analysis of the transitive construction in speech verbs. In order to do so we take as our starting point Faber and Mairal’s (1999) classification of sixty-two verbs of speech. On the basis of this classification, we have created a corpus of analysis by means of online searches of the British National Corpus and six English dictionaries. Through a careful examination of the examples, we have noticed that speech verbs are ascribed to a variety of recurrent constructions such as the ditransitive construction, the intransitive construction, and the THAT-construction, among others, although for space limitations we will only focus on the transitive construction.

In our view, the semantic grounding of speech verbs is what determines the construction to which they are ascribed and the syntactic structure by means of which they are realised. We have approached this research from a cognitive standpoint; for this reason, we will refer to two basic types of transitive construction, namely prototypical and non-prototypical. We will discuss this construction from both a syntactic and a semantic perspective. At the syntactic level, all the examples in our corpus present the same structure (S V O); nevertheless, at the semantic level we have been able to organise all our examples into three groups: (i) the prototypical transitive construction (e.g. I didn’t mean to insult you), where the object is directly affected by the action, (ii) the resultative construction (e.g. He whispered a word in my ear), where the object arises as the result of the action of the verb, and (iii) the relational construction (e.g. Someone might have guessed our secret), where the object simply specifies the scope of the action (cf. Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal, forthcoming, for similar views). Our point is that depending on the function of the object (O) at the semantic level, speech verbs will be ascribed to one of these constructions.

FABER, P. and R. MAIRAL. 1999. Constructing a Lexicon of English Verbs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
RUIZ DE MENDOZA, F.J. and R. MAIRAL. 2006. “Lexical and constructional representation in meaning construction: the cognitive underpinnings of the Lexical Grammatical Model”. Unpublished draft.




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