Los verbos disfrutar y gozar en el español medieval. Un estudio sobre conexiones entre la agricultura, el placer y la posesión

The verbal items disfrutar and gozar in Spanish share similar meanings and also resemble each other in switching from a transitive to an intransitive frame with a prepositional phrase complement. However, this was not always the case. In the oldest recordings of the Spanish language, indeed, there appear two lexical forms which, besides their opposition from a syntactic point of view (transitive vs. prepositional verb), express rather distinct types of events (gathering crops vs experiencing pleasure). These data motivate the hypothesis that a process of mutual attraction must have taken place in the course of time. In the present work, covering the Medieval period of Spanish, we study the behavior of disfrutar and gozar, focusing on the syntactic and semantic properties that keep them separated, while simultaneously paying attention to certain phenomena which, in retrospect, foreshadow their history of gradual convergence. In order to provide a full picture of their medieval uses, we will appeal to the figures of metaphor and metonymy, the mechanism of subjectification (Traugott, 1989) and the role played by horizontal relations in linguistic change (De Smet, 2012).