El régimen verbal en el Diccionario de construcción y régimen de la lengua castellana de Rufino José Cuervo: modernidad y perspectivas

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to show the extremely novel and modern character of the Dicionario de construcción y régimen (DCR) through the question of the verbal regime. While the existing dictionaries have the sole task of exploring the origin of the terms in the Castilian language in order to offer this language a prestigious filiation and prevent its alteration by the passage of time, the DCR abandons any transcendent basis in order to set a practical objective: to contribute to a better understanding of the use of words in speech and, in particular, to solve the problem of the particular regime of certain verbs and that of the use of adapted particles. For the first time, the various syntaxes of a word are systematically and exhaustively listed in a dictionary, including the various prepositional constructions of verbs. A work by not only a lexicographer, but also a linguist, the DCR is the result of a highly modern linguistic reflection conducted on three fundamental points: the semantics of the verb, the interrelationships between semantics and syntax, and the role and semantics of prepositions. Apart from echoing innovative linguistic theories of the period when certain principles of structuralism were in the making and, thus, breaking with the linguistic tradition of the 19th century, the DCR also announced structuralist theories that would not emerge until the second half of the 19th century.