Analysis of the transitive construction in speech verbs

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to make an analysis of the transitive construction in speech verbs. Our starting point is Faber and Mairal's (1999) classification of sixty-two verbs of speech. 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. Thus, 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 (where the object is directly affected by the action), (ii) the resultative construction (where the object arises as the result of the action of the verb), and (iii) the relational construction (where the object simply specifies the scope of the action; cf. Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal, forthcoming, for similar views