This study investigates the intricate polysemy of the Spanish perception verb sentir ('feel') which, analogous to the more-studied visual perception verbs ver ('see') and mirar ('look'), also displays an ample gamut of semantic uses in various syntactic environments. The investigation is based on a corpus-based behavioral profile (BP) analysis. Besides its methodological merits as a quantitative, systematic and verifiable approach to the study of meaning and to polysemy in particular, the BP analysis offers qualitative usage-based evidence for cognitive linguistic theorizing. With regard to the polysemy of sentir, the following questions were addressed: (1) What is the prototype of each cluster of senses? (2) How are the different senses structured: how many senses should be distinguished -i.e. which senses cluster together and which senses should be kept separately? (3) Which senses are more related to each other and which are highly distinguishable? (4) What morphosyntactic variables make them more or less distinguishable? The results show that two significant meaning clusters can be distinguished, which coincide with the division between the middle voice uses (sentirse) and the other uses (sentir). Within these clusters, a number of meaningful subclusters emerge, which seem to coincide largely with the more general semantic categories of physical, cognitive and emotional perception.

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This paper deals with the seemingly free competition between inflected and uninflected infinitives in Portuguese, a much-debated issue in Portuguese linguistics, which, however, has not been seriously empirically studied before. We specifically focus on Vesterinen's (2006, 2011) cognitive hypothesis according to which the inflected infinitive is used in cases in which the infinitival subject risks to be less cognitively accessible due to contextual reasons. We investigate this theory by analyzing both corpus and experimental (self-paced reading) data, making use of advanced linear modeling. We show that both types of analysis lead to complementary results: the inflected form primarily eases the processing of sentences with increased complexity. On the basis of these results, we argue that Vesterinen's accessibility account is but part of the solution for the inflected/non-inflected problem.

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Despite obvious interference risks, it has been argued in former studies that translations constitute a useful tool for investigating lexical phenomena. By means of a corpus study on prepositional clauses introduced byparain Spanish and Portuguese, the present paper shows that translations can also be a valuable methodological tool for the study of grammatical phenomena in a given language. The results from both a translation and a comparable Portuguese/Spanish and Spanish/Portuguese corpus are shown to converge and reveal that the inflection of the Portuguese infinitive is used to strengthen thematic continuity, whereas an overt subject appears in cases of inaccessibility within the sentence margins. The present study therefore deepens former accounts on the nature of the Portuguese inflected infinitive and the Spanish and Portuguesepara-clauses in general by comparing translations in both languages.