Patrones de ergatividad en el español peninsular

Abstract

Abstract Western Peninsular Spanish possesses a type of causative construction in which an intransitive lexeme is used as transitive. Specifically, the verbs caer (‘to fall’), quedar (‘to stay’) and entrar (‘to enter) can induce a direct object in detriment of the standard verbs tirar (‘to throw’), dejar (‘to leave’) and meter (‘to put in’). This phenomenon (called lability) has not been investigated in depth for Spanish and, with this paper I attempt to pinpoint its current geographical extension as well as the semantic factors that favour the transitivisation of these verbs.