Evolución de las colocaciones causativas emocionales del latín al español

Resumo

In contemporary Spanish collocations involving a notion of causation and a noun refer-ring to an emotion are regularly formed with dar ‘to give’, as in dar alegría ‘to make happy’ or dar pena ‘to cause to feel shame’. At earlier stages of the language, however, with mod-els rooted in Latin, these constructions licensed other verbs, in particular, hacer ‘to do, to create’ and poner ‘to put’. In the present paper, we trace the evolution of some causative emotion collocations with the three mentioned verbs from the 13th to the 20th century, paying special attention to the changes that took place in the transition between Latin and the Romance language. From this perspective, the phenomenon of major interest lies in the innovative use of poner meaning ‘to cause an emotion’, which, under our proposal, can be attributed to the persistence in Spanish of a collocational pattern firmly entrenched in Latin that contributed to the semantic shift and motivated the competition with dar in the constructions under study for many centuries.