SPANISH VERB SUPPORT CONSTRUCTIONS FROM A LEARNER PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Few studies exist on verb-support constructions (VSC) from a didactic perspective; however, the scant evidence available suggests that learners tend to employ these structures less frequently than native speakers. Didactic materials and dictionaries provide only very superficial treatment of these collocations. This corpus-based study of VSC in Spanish identifies a group of typical items for a specific genre (social sciences), and then describes certain morphosyntactic and semantic challenges that the extracted corpus examples present to English and German-speaking learners.Using these same concordances, we then develop model didactic exercises to focus on form, meaning and use.