«Why deverbal nouns rather than finite verbs?» A semantic-pragmatic case-study in Spanish and Portuguese.

Abstract

This paper focusses on a) the qualitative difference between octants depending on verbs and octants required by nouns and b) the question whether it might be primarily pragmatic rather than stylistic reasons which account for the preference of deverbal nouns over finite verbs in certain contexts. Political speeches by Franco and Salazar provide us with challenging corpora for our analysis.