The argumentative role of toward in constructions of direction and orientation: a syntactic-semantic analysis

Abstract

Argumental Structure has been broadly studied and approached from different perspectives.
The proposed differentiation between obligatory participants (actants or arguments) and marginal elements
(circumstants or adjuncts), initially attributed to Tesnière (1959), has triggered interest in syntactic studies
of various kinds. However, other authors (García-Miguel, 1996; Crego, 2003; Ibáñez, 2012) have questioned
the bipartite actant/circumstant division and proposed intermediate categories, resulting in a conception
of argumentality as a graded category. On this basis, the present study addresses a proposal for the
classification of the elements introduced by the Spanish preposition hacia ‘toward’ that express direction.
Based on examples of oral speech obtained from two corpora (Corpus Sociolingüístico de la Ciudad de
México and Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) and the schemas exposed in the ADESSE database,
the argumentative status of the elements expressing ‘Direction’ is shown. For this purpose, we take into
account the meanings proposed in previous studies for each verb class, the frequency of occurrence with
complements introduced by the preposition hacia ‘toward’, and the aspectual features of both the verb and
the preposition to which it is related. The results show that with some verb classes these complements
behave as adjuncts, but with others they can be considered as argumentative at different levels. In addition,
the label ‘Direction’ is proposed for a more general thematic role incorporating ‘Goal’ and ‘Orientation’ roles,
which would allow to account for a wider variety of cases.