Expressing the source of dispossession acts in French and Spanish

Abstract

It is well-known that in Germanic languages, the profiling of the source of a stealing event – that is, its degree of participation in or affectedness by the event – can be expressed through both lexical (e.g. the steal-rob alternation) and syntactic means (e.g. the dative alternation). This paper examines to what extent these alternations apply to Romance verbs of stealing by contrasting the syntax and semantics, and more particularly the different constructional possibilities of the verbs of dispossession voler in French and robar in Spanish. By analysing a comparable corpus we aim to give an account of the formal, semantic or discourse-pragmatic parameters which possibly determine the speakers’ choice of one of the various competing constructions, among which the dative construction (with or without clitic doubling in Spanish), the pronominal factitive construction in French, and the genitive construction. The analysis shows that the role of the source – i.e. the injured participant or the victim of the dispossession event – plays a central role in this constructional alternation.