Abstract:Conative constructions have enjoyed considerable attention over the past decade from a typological perspective.
However, the historical development of conativity in individual languages has been largely neglected to date. In this paper, we
put forth an exhaustive diachronic analysis of the Spanish verbal construction tratar de + INF (currently ‘to
attempt to INF’, whereby tratar originally means ‘handle’). We show that, unlike many periphrases, tratar… Show more
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