MAIN VERB+GERUND CONSTRUCTIONS IN ENGLISH EXPLAINED BY MEANS OF SEMANTIC TRANSITIVE FEATURES

There have been remarkable works on semantic transitivity although they are, to a certain extent, limited. Firstly, most of these works have only focused on syntactic constructions in which the second participant, syntactic direct object, is a Noun Phrase. Secondly, most of the works dealing with gerunds as syntactic direct objects, do not take semantic transitivity into consideration. We claim that gerund complements occurring after main verbs (i.e. [subject] [main verb] [gerund]) can be explained by taking the notion of semantic transitivity as a reference. In this sense, semantic transitivity is based on features relevant to two-participant events. In this context, a prototypical transitive event implies an event instigated by a volitionally acting agent that causes a change in an affected patient. Therefore, with the aid of a corpus, we aim to analyse the structure [sub-ject] [main verb] [gerund] in English in relation to the most relevant features involved in coding semantic transitivity, in particular, in terms of the prototypical agent and patient. Key words: semantic transitivity; structure [subject] [main verb] [gerund]; two-participant events; prototypical agent and patient Resumen Ha habido trabajos destacados sobre la transitividad semántica a pesar de que presentan ciertas limitaciones. En primer lugar, la mayoría de estos trabajos se han M. ÁNGELES GÓMEZ CASTEJÓN27