Intransitividad escindida en español: el uso auxiliar de "ser" en español medieval

Abstract

Some grammarians have suggested that it might exist a special class of inaccusative verbs in Spanish. From a purely syntactic point of view, the most outstanding and peculiar feature of these verbs is the use of the auxiliary be for the formation of compound tenses, until the end of the XVI century. This paper will study the syntactic behaviour of such verbs and will prove that they also share some other characteristics. From a semantic point of view, they can be classified under a reduced number of groups, namely, verbs of occurrence and appearance, verbs expressing change of state, verbs of rest and verbs of movement. The verbs included in these groups share, exceptions made, the peculiar feature that their grammatical subject is affected to some extent by the action or state designated by the verb. This is normally the case of actions of low agentivity, in which the grammar subject turns out to be the patient in semantic terms.