Verbs in motion: the case of "chegar" and "arribar"
Abstract
In contemporary Portuguese, chegar has a dominant use as a motion verb, which means to arrive to a destination close to the speaker. It also has other meanings, which, in some cases, replicate the semantic generalization that its etymon (i.e. Lat. applicare 'to join') has undergone.
The evolution of the Portuguese verb is shared by the Galician chegar and by the Castilian llegar, but it finds no echo in Catalan, in French or in Italian. In these languages, it is a derivative of ripa 'bank' that plays the same role, with some similar polysemy. And the same holds for the Romanian verb a ajunge. From the same etymon (i.e. ripa), Portuguese (Galician and Castilian) has received the verb arribar, but in the lexicon of these languages, there is no room for the incorporation of this verb as a motion verb.
In this paper, we present the textual documentation that allows establishing the chronology of the major semantic changes of these verbs and the analysis of such data.
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