Los dobles participios en español: Estudio de corpus

Abstract

Some verbs in Spanish present in their non-finite verb form of past participles the possibility of possessing both a regular and an irregular form: 'Freído'/'frito'(fried), 'imprimido'/'impreso' (printed), etc. It is well known that the past participle may function both as a verb and as an adjective, and this universality makes it particularly interesting to observe how these doublets of participles are applied and in which contexts they appear in contemporary Spanish, aspect this investigation wish to elaborate. In order to delimit the investigation and to be able to provide sufficiently detailed descriptions, we will focus the study on the four participles pairs, that is, 'bendecido'/'bendito' (from the verb 'bendecir' [to bless]), 'freído'/'frito' (from the verb 'freír' [to fry]), 'imprimido'/'impreso' (from the verbo 'imprimir' [to print]) and 'corrompido'/'corrupto' (from the verb 'corromper' [to corrupt]). We have through in-depth analysis of examples found in various corpus of the Spanish language (i.e. El corpus de CREA and El corpus del Español de Davies) discovered that they show distributional differences when it comes to this double functionality of the participles. It appears that the regular forms 'bendecido', 'freído' and 'imprimido' are exclusively verbal forms, while the irregular participles 'bendito' and 'corrupto' always receive adjectival interpretations. The regular form 'corrompido' and the irregular participles 'frito' and 'impreso', on the other hand, may alternate between the two possible functions. Furthermore, this thesis relates the discoveries with two fundamental morphological theories, that is, lexicalism and constructionism. None of these two linguistic theories as they are formulated today provide appropriate explanations, and therefore we suggest that it is necessary to address each verb separately in order to understand the alternation between the two participial forms, considering the syntactic, semantic and even geographic factors of each verb.