[A todo + INF]: speed and intensification in a Spanish constructional idiom

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to integrate the precepts of Construction Grammar into phraseology, for which a holistic description of the Spanish constructional idiom [a todo + INF] is provided. Constructional idioms are constructional patterns composed of certain fixed constituents and others that, although free slots, are subject to certain restrictions in terms of their combinations. The inductive methodology used to analyse these constructions is based on the assumption that frequency of use favours the creation of combinatory patterns, so that the analysis is carried out using data collected in various reference corpora, including the Spanish corpus of the TenTen family, available through the Sketch Engine program, Sketch Engine Spanish Web 2018. Such an analysis includes: the justification of its phraseological character, confirming its high degree of fixation, both formal and cognitive (entrenchment); a description of its meaning, whose core is intensification; a description of the types of verbs that prototypically fill the free slot, which mostly designate durative rather than delimited events, and the possibility of its integration into other constructions. This study confirms that an approach that encompasses both formal features and semantic and pragmatic ones and that bases the analysis on data extracted from large corpora offers more homogeneous, exhaustive, and convincing characterizations of constructional idioms, which have often been considered only from a formal perspective.