Cláusulas flexionadas predicativas con verbos de percepción

Resumen

This paper proposes a discursive presentational analysis of the sentence type Vio a los gemelos Vicario que corrían hacia la iglesia (“She saw the Vicario twins running towards the church”) by adapting a hypothesis from Lambrecht (2000) for French. It is argued that this construction is pragmatically motivated and that it shares discursive properties with the so-called proleptic constituents (La descubrí que me fue infiel “I found out that she cheated on me”). It is claimed that, in the most typical cases, the event expressed in the finite subordinate clause allows to reveal or to confirm the identity of the object referent. Corpus data from CREA clearly show that there exist interferences between finite clauses behaving as secondary predications —denoting direct sensorial perception or no epistemic perception— and object complement clauses —denoting typically epistemic perception, on sensorial grounds or purely cognitive—. Blending takes place when the theme argument in pronominal form is signaling a given discourse entity that functions as a reference point for the perception event.