Teaching verbal periphrases in the Spanish as a Foreign Language classroom: reflections from the lexical-syntactic perspective

Abstract

The present work carries out an analysis from a lexical-syntactic perspective of the general problems posed by verb periphrases in the context of studies of Spanish as a Foreign Language. Though periphrases are typically seen as primitive concepts of grammar, we propose re-examining them as categories derived from the projection of the lexical-syntactic properties of their auxiliary verbs. The extension of the working domain of the lexical-syntactic interface from the field of theoretical and descriptive linguistics to that of linguistics applied to Spanish as a Foreign Language offers interesting didactic results with regards to periphrases and to other topics traditionally pigeonholed as merely grammatical phenomena. We undertake the integration of methodologies for teaching grammar and for teaching lexicon. We likewise underscore the possibilities of the role this interface could play in the field of Spanish as a Foreign Language.