Resumen

ZABALEGUI, Nerea. A ver si nos perdemos: The Construction a ver si in the History of Spanish. Núcleo [online]. 2010, vol.22, n.27, pp.93-114. ISSN 0798-9784.

This study investigates the construction a ver si throughout the history of the Spanish language, based on the distinction between its primary and secondary usages. In the former case, the construction depends on a previous syntactic segment (Pregunte a su hermana a ver si ella sabe algo), and in the latter, a ver si heads independent sentences that have different pragmatic values (A ver si nos perdemos). I took the cases which I analyzed from the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE) and categorized them, firstly, according to their type of usage (primary or secondary) and the century in which the text was written. Secondly, I categorized the primary usages according to the type of verb that this construction depends on (transitive, intransitive, copulative, and impersonal), and the secondary usages according to the type of statement (expressive or directive), the subtype, and whether it occurs in  a dialogue or not. The results show that: i) the primary usages basically depend on intransitive verbs; ii) the secondary usages are of late appearance in the history of Spanish and are mainly used in dialogues; and iii) a ver si heads, mostly, expressive statements of desire or expectations, as well as directive statements of order or request.

Palabras clave : perception verb ver; syntactic constructions; history of the Spanish language.

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