"Hablar y decir": la especialización informativa de los verbos de lengua en español

Abstract

In Spanish, some verbs of speech have specialized in expressing metalinguistic references to the topic (what we talk about), whereas others make it regarding the comment (what is said of a topic). This property related to the information structure originates a binary division in the semantic field, from which the forms hablar and decir have been set up as archetypical representatives. On the formal level of the language, the informative value corresponds to specific syntactic constructions, since the verbs that allow you to refer to the topic usually make use of a supplement as adjacent (habla de fútbol), and those referring to the comment express it by means of an implement (dice que es un buen portero). From the consideration of this property as a basic feature, we analyze the behavior of speech verbs in response to both its informative value as the syntactic constructions that accompany this specialization