Logos

CONSTRUCTIONcon.spa.empezar-a-infinitivo

perífrasis incoativa con empezar a

A two part predicate stating that an event has reached its beginning, with nothing asserted about what follows.

The construction picks out the initial boundary of an event and asserts that it has been reached, leaving what follows unstated, which is why it combines freely with a subsequent statement that the event then stopped. It belongs to the group of periphrases that select a phase of the event rather than a viewpoint on it as a whole, and that group is what makes the infinitive family aspectual as well as modal. Because the auxiliary retains a good deal of its ordinary meaning here, the construction is a boundary case for the family: the test that admits it is that the infinitive is not an ordinary complement, which shows in the fact that a clitic belonging to the infinitive may attach to the finite verb.

statusstatus
documentedasserted, and the sources agree
provenanceprovenance
authoredwritten for Logos, from first principles
derivation statusderivation_status
unstatednobody has said whether it follows from anything
saliencesalience
No salience. Where no frequency source applies the object carries none, rather than a default or a guess (03-schema.md §3.5).
aliasesaliases
  • metalanguageinceptive periphrasis
sourcessources
  • SOURCENueva gramática de la lengua española (2009)src.nueva-gramaticano page in v1
  • SOURCEA New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish (Butt and Benjamin)src.butt-benjaminno page in v1

Why this is a construction at all

construction.admission

Goldberg's admission test: a template earns storage either by being unpredictable or by being frequent.

admissionadmission
frequentit is stored because it recurs often enough to be learned whole

The slots

construction.slots

At least two, by the schema: fewer is not a multi-element template. Every filler is a link, never a name in prose.

  1. 0el auxiliar empezar, finitolexically specified: only the fillers below may occupy it

    fillerslots[].filler
    functionslots[].fn
    No function is assigned to this slot.

  2. 1el nexo a, obligatoriolexically specified: only the fillers below may occupy it

    fillerslots[].filler
    functionslots[].fn
    No function is assigned to this slot.

  3. 2el infinitivolexically specified: only the fillers below may occupy it

    fillerslots[].filler
    functionslots[].fn
    FUNCTIONnúcleofun.spa.nucleo

Slot template

3 slots: 3 constrained, 0 positional, 1 naming a grammatical function.

  1. el auxiliar empezar, finito
    constrained
    • verbo auxiliarclass
  2. el nexo a, obligatorio
    constrained
    • preposiciónclass
  3. el infinitivo
    constrained
    • verboclass

    names núcleo

Confusable with

construction.confusable

Objects a reader is likely to mix up with this one, and the difference that separates them. The edge is symmetric and stored once, so this renders on both objects' pages from the one statement.

Everything joined to this object

One group per typed edge, in both directions. A1b guarantees no object node is an orphan, so this is the whole navigation: an object with no edges would have failed the build rather than reached this page.

What this object is a kind of

Walking this object's own `is-a` edges: what it is a kind of. Several branches from one object are several classification axes, not competing supertypes.

objects
2
places drawn
2
multi-parent
None in this view. This subgraph happens to be a tree, which the explorer draws as one without assuming it is one.

dimensions in viewauxiliary

Siblings are listed by name, then by id to break ties. That is a display choice made here and not an order the graph asserts.

Fan-out per dimension

A4

One row per dimension, largest first. That is a display order, not a verdict: 03-schema.md declares no threshold above which fan-out is too much, so this reports the count and grades nothing.

  • case13 values
  • mood8 values
  • voice8 values
  • aspect7 values
  • aktionsart6 values
  • number6 values
  • person6 values
  • tense6 values
  • comparison4 values
  • evidentiality4 values
  • gender4 values
  • politeness4 values
  • valency4 values
  • animacy3 values
  • definiteness3 values
  • deixis3 values
  • finiteness2 values
  • information structure2 values
  • interrogativity2 values
  • polarity2 values
  • switch-reference2 values

What kinds of this object there are

Walking the `is-a` edges that point at this object: what kinds of it there are. An object reachable two ways is drawn in both places and is still one object.

objects
1
places drawn
1
multi-parent
None in this view. This subgraph happens to be a tree, which the explorer draws as one without assuming it is one.

dimensions in viewauxiliary

Siblings are listed by name, then by id to break ties. That is a display choice made here and not an order the graph asserts.

is-a

edges.is-a

subsumption

this object is a

has-a

edges.has-a

the parent carries this

this object carries

derives

edges.derives

the why-chain

derived by