Auditory verbs in the Spanish languagea historical and cognitive approach

Résumé

The present paper has as its aim to offer an analysis about the most important auditory verbs in the Spanish language from a historical and cognitive-functional approach. Evidence will be offered that the patterns for semantic development and syntactic functioning shown by auditory verbs are iconically motivated by the physiological particularities of the human ear. It will also be demonstrated, following the hypothesis about classical Greek and Hebrew proposed by Sweetser (1990) and Viejo Sánchez (2004), that the abstract meaning of obedecer [to obey] developed by the Spanish verb escuchar [to listen] finds its cultural motivation in certain recurrent contexts coming from religious language. In short, this research work not only provides new evidence supporting the hypothesis of language corporeization but also supplies data confirming that linguistic change processes are connected to cultural and anthropological aspects.