The Spanish verb-particle construction [V para atrás

Abstract

Spanish verb-particle constructions such as llamar para atrás ‘call back’ or ir para atrás ‘go back’, which are found among bilingual speakers in the USA, have been attributed either to structural and/or semantic contact with English or to merely language-internal evolutions. In the present contribution, I provide a qualitative corpus study on the role of [V para atrás] in European, Mexican, and US Spanish, combining a constructional framework with cognitive-semantic, variational and pragmatic-functional approaches. The study reveals that [V para atrás] can be considered a constructional idiom situated in the middle range between lexicon and syntax in all three varieties under study. It also shows that [V para atrás] in US Spanish differs from European and Mexican Spanish with regard to its extended combinatorial properties and the degree of meaning extensions from the spatial into the aspectual domain. These findings allow a more nuanced view on the role of language contact and constructional change, since the properties of US Spanish [V para atrás] can be modelled via intra- and interlingual inheritance links in the cognitive network of bilingual speakers.