The similative-pretence alternating pair and filler-slot relations

Abstract The present paper investigates the similative-pretence alternating pair in Mexican Spanish ( como/igual que and como si constructions) based on the analysis of 1362 instances from The Corpus del Español NOW (News on the Web) corpus. We apply a revised version of distinctive collexeme analysis to our concordance data to explore the variety of different verbs that can occur in the first slot of similative and pretence constructions. Specifically, we use (i) a new measure that distinguishes the attraction that a verb lemma exerts on a construction from the attraction that a construction exerts on a verb lemma and (ii) bootstrapping on the level of files to, for the first time, provide proper confidence intervals in the context of collostructional studies. The from-verb lemma-to-construction analysis shows that there is a significant attraction of epistemic lemmas (e.g., parecer ‘to seem’) to occur in como ‘like’, and of mistaken identity lemmas (e.g., actuar ‘to act’) to appear in como si ‘as if’ constructions. The from-construction-to-verb lemma analysis, on the other hand, demonstrates that igual que ‘like’ significantly attracts epistemic perception verbs (e.g., ver ‘to look’), and como si ‘as if’ constructions significantly attract the verb lemma sentir ‘to feel.’