Resumen de The role of determiners in Spanish light verb constructions
Light verb constructions such as Sp. hacer una acusación ‘to make an accusation’, dar la enhorabuena ‘to congratulate’, or hacer alusión ‘to refer’ are considered a type of semi-phraseological expressions displaying some syntactic peculiarities which show a certain degree of fixation. Among those, the behavior of the determiner that accompanies the noun (mainly its absence or particular fixation) has been one of the major arguments in emphasizing their phraseological nature. Based on the hypothesis that light verb constructions are closer to regular free expressions than to phraseological ones, the aim of this paper is to prove that most of the so-called irregularities in the manifestation of determiners can be explained by the semantic and lexical features of the noun and the construction itself rather than by structural fixation or the particular idiosyncrasies of these expressions. The examined language is Spanish, and the data have been collected according to the semantic criteria of the membership of the noun to the semantic field ‘communication’ and the co-occurrence of the noun with the light verbs dar ‘to give’ and hacer ‘to make’. As determiners, we study definite and indefinite articles, the absence of the article, and possessive determiners.
