De Spaanse inchoatiefconstructie in beeld. Clusteranalyse als antwoord op het quasi-synonymie vraagstuk

This study about the productivity and the near-synonymy of the inchoative construction in Peninsular Spanish reveals that at least 25 verbs can enter the auxiliary slot. These auxiliaries are recruited from six semantic domains: (1) superlexical inherent inchoative verbs, (2) put verbs, (3) throw verbs, (4) movement verbs, (5) manual manipulation verbs and (6) verbs of destruction. This study confirms that a hierarchical cluster analysis is suited to investigate the near-synonymy of semantically related verbs as it unfolds interesting clusters for the inchoative auxiliaries. Concretely, the hierarchical cluster analysis divides the auxiliaries into three clusters. A first one with the superlexical auxiliaries (comenzar, empezar and iniciar), a second cluster with the put verbs (meter and poner) and a third cluster with the less grammaticalized and more lexicalized auxiliaries echarse and romper.