Abstract
The present study begins by briefly illustrating why grammatical collocations do not meet a traditional definition of collocation, i.e. of two units that frequently and preferentially appear together. Next, itdiscusses the role of prepositions in grammatical collocations and questions whetherthey carry specific semantic meaning or rather function as mere links between verb and complement and should thus be considered semantically empty.Finally, it analyses the frequency of queismo and dequeismo with the verb enterarse in adiachronic corpus of Spanish (CORDE). Our results lead us to hypothesize that, in written language, queismo is a consequence of a tendency of the language towards economy: in the presence of two subordinating links –a preposition and a conjunction – the preposition is droppedin order to avoid having a subordinate clause with a personal verb form. However, we could also hypothesize that the drop of the preposition before que is a consequence of the influence of other languages, such as Catalan, French, Italian and Portuguese,in the works of Spanish writers.
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