Los verbos de apoyo en español: estudio de pillar, agarrar, coger y tomar

Abstract

The goal of this master thesis is to develop an empiric study of four Spanish light verbs, which have semantically close meaning: agarrar, pillar, tomar, and coger; roughly, ‘to take’. There are thus two interesting components of this study: to understand better the behavior of these verbs when they function as light verbs and to find leads in how to differentiate their use, as at first they appear to be synonyms. This study posits the question of how the interpretation of these verbs changes when they go from being heavy verbs to light verbs, and the way to do so is through a corpus analysis that will allow us to identify what kind of nouns the verbs can be combined with, how they differ from one another semantically and formally, and what they similarities may be. This paper is structured over seven chapters; the first chapter presents the introduction and the theoretical base of the study, the second chapter discusses the methodology I’ve used,. The four chapters that follow this one consist on a presentation of each of these verbs, where I present the examples that have been found in the corpus and discuss the meaning extracted from these examples. The last chapter includes the final conclusion where I compare the verbs and their properties, and finally I introduce a presentation of the theoretical consequences which my study approaches.