The verbs of falling in Spanish

The paper deals with the verbal lexemes used to express the semantics of falling in Spanish. Falling is understood as uncontrolled downward movement without contact with any surface during the movement. The study also deals with different parameters of falling, such as the initial point, the final point, distance, speed, etc. which influence the lexification of falling events. The paper analyzes only direct uses of verbal lexemes used to express the semantics of falling in Spanish. The frame-based approach is applied to the analysis of lexical values and lexical units capable of describing a number of prototypical situations for falling following the principles and methods of the Moscow Lexical Typology Group. Main sources of language material for the study include the “Falling” questionnaire, the dictionary of Spanish Royal Academy, Spanish-Russian dictionaries, as well as Spanish language corpora. The analysis shows that Spanish language is a dominant system with the verb caer(se) as the basic verb of falling. The study found out that several lexemes compete with the dominant verb in certain contexts. An attempt is made not only to denote the intersection points of the dominant verb of falling and other verbal lexemes serving a given semantic sphere, but also to define their functional distribution. At the same time, the cases of the combined use of the dominant verb caer(se) and the competing lexemes are considered, when the dominant verb states directly the fact of the fall of the object onto the surface, and the competing lexemes describe the fall itself: falling out of the container, slipping etc. Moreover, in some situations of falling (such as the falling of homogeneous objects or the turnover of an upright container) specialized verbal lexemes tend to be used instead of the dominant verb. A number of peripheral incidence situations are characterized by lexemes whose direct meaning does not contain a semantic component of falling.