Verbs of cognition in Spanish: Constructional schemas and reference points

This paper examines the interaction between verb meaning and construction meaning using as an example a group of so-called 'cognition ’ or ‘propositional attitude ’ verbs in Spanish (saber, creer, pensar, considerar, juzgar, estimar, imaginar, suponer, etc). Such a set of verbs share a number of semantic and conceptual features that partly condition the constructional schemas in which they can appear. Our point of departure agrees with Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995) in the assumption that, on the one hand, verbs involve frame-semantic meanings, and on the other hand, constructions have cognitive abstract meaning partly independent of verbs instantiating them. Thereby, the final mean-ing is the result of the interaction between verb meaning and construction meaning. The frame activated by cognition verbs involves a conceptualizer and a conceptual content, but each construction proposes a specific construal of the scene. The more relevant differ-ences have to do with the relative prominence of entities that can serve as reference-point in the mental access path from the conceptualizer to the propositional conten