Schematicity vs. lexicality: typological differences between Danish and Spanish

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ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to demonstrate how Danish and Spanish from a typological, cross-linguistic perspective differ systematically from each other both within the domain of verbal lexicalization patterns related to the encoding of the semantic components Motion, Manner and Path and in terms of the predicate formation strategies dominating the two languages. First, on the basis of a contrastive analysis between the Spanish Motion-Path conflating verb pairs meter ‘insert’/sacar ‘extract’ and entrar ‘enter’/salir ‘exit’ and the Danish activity/Manner-of-motion verbs sprøjte ‘spray’ and stikke ‘stick’, it is argued that each language disposes of sets of abstract lexemes that do not exist in the other language. They lexicalize on different levels, one could say. Second, and strongly related to the first point, the article suggests that the preference of Danish to create complex schematic expression structures, where Spanish tends to concentrate information in monomorphemic, semantically saturated lexemes, can be explained by applying a template for valence variation that distinguishes between two basic and two extended sentence structures. Specifically, it is the (im)possibility of realizing the so-called A relation, the ‘third’ argument, that constitutes the differentiating factor between Danish and Spanish.

KEYWORDS:

• Typological contrasts
• lexicalization patterns
• motion events
• schematicity
• telicity
• valence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Examples (1) and (1’) are retrieved from Morata and Müller (2022, 130), but their glossing and English translations are provided here for the first time. The interlinear glossing throughout the article follows the Leipzig rules (see https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/Glossing-Rules.pdf and Appendix 1 for the list of abbreviations used).

² The data used in the article are authentic corpus examples from KorpusDK (Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab), the Danish press and Corpus del Español (Davies 2002). Translations into Spanish are suggestions provided by us.

³ The TYPOlex group was a group of researchers from the Copenhagen Business School who since 1997 to a high degree focused their research and publishing activities on typological contrasts between “exocentric” (Romance) and “endocentric” (Germanic) languages. The group was led by Professor Michael Herslund.

⁴ Danish has a paradigm of directional adverbs which distinguishes between (i) dynamic forms, cf. Han kører ud i skoven ‘He drives out in the woods’, (ii) static forms, cf. Han er ud-e i skoven ‘He is out in the woods’, and (iii) progressive forms, cf. Han kører ud-ad mod skoven ‘He drives towards the woods’ (Harder, Heltoft, and Nedergaard Thomsen 1996). Only the dynamic adverbs are treated in this article.

⁵ We mark V (verb) in bold, O (object) underlined, and A (adject) in bold and underlined.

⁶ In this specific example, the means of transportation is expressed by the subject referent.

⁷ These authors link the phenomenon of absence of unaccusativization in Greek with the existence of grammatical aspect in this language, and by typological analogy, they assume that the reduced unaccusativization potential of Spanish verbs might be related to the perfective/imperfective dichotomy in the past tense in Spanish. However, in Spanish, grammatical aspect is only relevant in the past tense, and as the restrictions with respect to unaccusativization apply both in the present and the past tense, the establishment of a causational relation between these phenomena seems unwarranted (see Pedersen 2019a for a detailed criticism of Horrocks & Stavrou’s hypothesis about Spanish).