put-PST.3SG in the inside of.ART.SG car between the asientos delanteros y el de atrás seats front and the of back. not to flatten the still delicate branches of the saplings he just bought, instead of ‘In order putting the two flowerpots into the boot, he put them in the inside of the car, between the front seats and the ones in the back.’ Indeed these examples seem to suggest that from an intra-linguistic viewpoint both Vs are freely interchangeable and may alternate in the same syntactic-semantic contexts. However, a quick analysis of a set of minimal pairs shows that in certain contexts only one of both Vs is highly frequent, while the other one causes problems of acceptability or does not occur at all. Consider the following cases: (853 000 hits) vs. (5 hits), put oneself meterse en el ascensor ponerse en el ascensor ‘to in the elevator’; (6700 hits) vs. *meter (no hits), poner los platos sobre la mesa los platos sobre la mesa put the plates on the ‘to table’. Hence, the verbs are no perfect synonyms and their syntactic-semantic distribution is not identical. The observed differences for the V pair were studied by Cifuentes (1996, 2004). The author argues that the fundamental difference between and resides in the direction of the poner meter placement movement (Cifuentes 2004: 81). In this view, both Vs belong to two different subcategories of the locative Vs: (1) is classified as a directional V with a particular meter preference for movements with an internally oriented directionality, that is, objects are placed inside a space; (2) is defined as a more static positional V (cf. also Cifuentes 1996: 103, poner 139). Although Cifuentes’ theory provides a plausible explanation for the clear preference for internal direction (e.g. two meterse en el ascensor), meter in the examples above expressing issues remain unanswered: analysis is mainly based on introspective reflection, illustrated with well-selected Cifuentes’ but often isolated examples. So, up to now, there is a lack of thorough empirical evidence for
put-PST.3SG in the inside of.ART.SG car between the asientos delanteros y el de atrás seats front and the of back. ‘In order not to flatten the still delicate branches of the saplings he just bought, instead of putting the two flowerpots into the boot, he put them in the inside of the car, between the front seats and the ones in the back.’ Indeed these examples seem to suggest that from an intra-linguistic viewpoint both Vs are freely interchangeable and may alternate in the same syntactic-semantic contexts. However, a quick analysis of a set of minimal pairs shows that in certain contexts only one of both Vs is highly frequent, while the other one causes problems of acceptability or does not occur at all. Consider the following cases: meterse en el ascensor (853 000 hits) vs. ponerse en el ascensor (5 hits), ‘to put oneself in the elevator’; poner los platos sobre la mesa (6700 hits) vs. *meter los platos sobre la mesa (no hits), ‘to put the plates on the table’. Hence, the verbs are no perfect synonyms and their syntactic-semantic distribution is not identical. The observed differences for the V pair were studied by Cifuentes (1996, 2004). The author argues that the fundamental difference between poner and meter resides in the direction of the placement movement (Cifuentes 2004: 81). In this view, both Vs belong to two different subcategories of the locative Vs: (1) meter is classified as a directional V with a particular preference for movements with an internally oriented directionality, that is, objects are placed inside a space; (2) poner is defined as a more static positional V (cf. also Cifuentes 1996: 103, 139). Although Cifuentes’ theory provides a plausible explanation for the clear preference for meter in the examples above expressing internal direction (e.g. meterse en el ascensor), two issues remain unanswered: Cifuentes’ analysis is mainly based on introspective reflection, illustrated with well-selected but often isolated examples. So, up to now, there is a lack of thorough empirical evidence for
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