On the transitivisation of intransitive verbs. A Spanish-English contrastive corpus-based analysis of the verbs dormir and sleep

This paper offers a Spanish-English contrastive corpus-based study of the possible transitive uses of the verbs dormir and sleep in Peninsular Spanish and the American and British varieties of English, respectively. The results obtained show that their transitivity cannot be reduced, as usually pointed out in the literature, to the cognate object construction (dormir el sueno de los justos/sleep the sleep of the just), since, in addition to this pattern, both intransitive verbs undergo a transitivisation process in other structures which have gone almost unnoticed in the literature: namely, (i) lexical causative constructions (dormir al nino/sleep the baby), (ii) transitive patterns with other non-subcategorised objects, different from cognates (dormir la borrachera/sleep the meal), (iii) constructions with direct objects promoted from adverbial prepositional phrases (dormir la manana/sleep the morning), (iv) and finally, the way construction (sleep your way to the top), only attested in English. My main objective is to highlight the syntactico-semantic similarities and differences which these constructions exhibit in Spanish and English, as well as those concerning their frequency of occurrence.