Abstract

CASTILLO, Fabiola et al. Different ways of coding the instrument. Cuad. Lingüíst. Col. Méx. [online]. 2019, vol.6, n.1, e86.  Epub Feb 18, 2020. ISSN 2007-736X.  https://doi.org/10.24201/clecm.v6i1.86.

As a semantic role, an instrument is defined as an inanimate, non-volitional, and controlled participant that facilitates a change of state in the patient. Because of its nature as a physical cause of an event, the instrument can be expressed as an adjunct (I opened the door with the key) and a subject (The key opened the door.) The aim of this paper is to examine different ways of coding the instrument within a special group of events: those that denote the separation in the material integrity of objects. The analysis focuses on Mexican Spanish. The data was collected following previous typological studies (Bohnemeyer et al. 2001; Majid et al. 2007), meaning we can describe the behavior of one participant within the same semantic domain in real data. In the analysis, we distinguish between primary coding, the use of a prepositional phrase (basically, con ‘with’ like in el hombre cortó la rama con el machete), and secondary coding, including its function as subject (el machete cortó la rama), direct object (el hombre usó el machete para cortar la rama), complement of light verbs (le dio de machetazos a la rama), lexicalization within the verb (el hombre macheteó la rama), manner adjuncts (el hombre cortó la rama a machetazos), and more than one coding within the same clause (el hombre dio un golpe a la rama con un machete) The main goal is to explore two aspects: the status and coding of the instrument associated to events of separation, and the potential motivations that might influence the selection of less typical coding expressions.

Keywords : instrument; lexical codification; corpus; separation verbs; Cut & Break.

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