Abstract

This paper applies some constructionist analysis tools to a specific case in the Spanish language: the caused-motion constructions with the verb poner and its equivalence relationship to transitive simple verbs. To explain the existence and differences in variants in the constructions of poner, cognitivist concepts of profile, base and metaphor are used and applied along with the principles of role-fusion, coercion and weak compositionality of constructions. This non-exhaustive study is based on actual use of the expressions with poner. To accomplish this, the expressions were extracted from the Corpus de Referencia del Español, CREA (Corpus of Reference of Current Spanish), of the Real Academia Española. We sought the co-occurrence to the input poner with expressions that together were equivalent to simple verbs in Spanish. After a process of constructional analysis of the verb argument structure, those constructions that had little representation in the corpus were dismissed, as well as those that their contexts were very restrictive. In selected cases though, participant roles, semantic frameworks that shape and contain various conceptual metaphors were discussed.