From “throwing rocks” to “starting to cry”. The grammaticalization of Spanish throw verbs into inchoative auxiliaries

Abstract

The inchoative construction expresses the onset of an event and is very productive in Peninsular Spanish. This study zooms in on the grammaticalization of throw verbs (arrojar, echar, lanzar and tirar) as auxiliaries in the inchoative construction and analyzes why this category is such a productive source for the inchoative aspect. It claims that the semantic domains of ‘throwing’ and ‘the start of an event’ are cross-linguistically related and that the grammaticalization process constitutes a case of metaphorical extension. The paper argues that the pathway towards the inchoative schema consists of five stages: (1) transitive use, (2) pronominal use denoting concrete movement, (3) pronominal use denoting abstract movement, (4) combine with an infinitive (bridging context) and (5) the inchoative use. Echar was the first throw verb to take on the inchoative aspect, in the 13th century, after which other near-synonymous verbs were attracted to the inchoative schema.