Retención semántica e innovación léxica: estudio diacrónico del verbo ir

Abstract

Motion verbs have been mainly attractive for offering convincing evidence of language change: grammaticalization or pragmaticalization (Heine, 1993; Company Company, 2004). However, there are few studies which focus on the lexical reconstruction of the meanings of these predicates by means of comparing diachronic evidence. This paper examines the Spanish motion verb ir (to go) from a historical perspective with the aim of establishing its vitality as a motion predicate. It also deals with the semantic extensions which the verb exhibits. The main conclusion is that this verb not only leans towards temporalization, but also to increasingly complex domains.