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This article summarises an examination of sentence patterns in modern European standard Spanish, in order to give an answer to the following questions: How many different sentence patterns are there and which are the most frequent patterns in modern European Spanish? Based on the principles of verb valency, as established by Lucien Tesnière and further developed by Ulrich Engel and others, a corpus of 500 sentences is analysed, identifying the sentence patterns of the main clauses. The analysis shows 19 different sentence patterns, the most frequent of which is p-s-cd, that is, predicate – subject – direct object. Subsequently, the results are compared to those of a different study on Spanish sentence patterns.
This paper discusses complementation strategies in Spanish, focusing on a specific construction most speakers are not aware of: the complementation clause preceded by the verb conocer. Not being a typical complement-taking verb, conocer surprises with a stable and persistent presence throughout the centuries, from Old Spanish to Modern Spanish. After giving an introduction into the field of complementation clauses and one of its main focus of study, grammatical mood, this study uses empirical data from the corpus programs CORDE, CREA and CORPES XXI to show the usage and prevalence of the construction in question. In doing so, this analysis gives a quantitative insight, exemplifying the results with several examples from all ages.