"¿Por qué no gustas de mí, como yo gusto de ti?" The verb "gustar" and its prepositional complement in Contemporary Spanish

Abstract

In order to contribute to a better understanding of the correlation between the semantic and syntactic behaviour of the polysemous verb gustar, we trace, from a diatopic perspective, the different interpretations that this verb can have when appearing with a nominative and a prepositional complement [NOM + gusta + de + Noun Phrase]. The data used for this qualitative paper proceed from social media, such as Twitter. It is demonstrated that this syntactic schema is far more common in the Spanish-speaking world than previously thought and that, despite diatopic differences, it can take all known meanings, presenting as such more semantic flexibility than reported before.