Atracción y distanciamiento en la historia de disfrutar y gozar

The verbs disfrutar ‘to enjoy’ y gozar ‘to be delighted’, in contemporary Spanish, have similar meanings and share the ability to appear with either a direct or a prepositional object. In earlier stages of the language, however, they functioned as two semantically and syntactically distinct items (Sanz Martin y Melis, 2022). To shed light on the changes that must have taken place, the present study traces the evolution of disfrutar y gozar, from the 16th to the 20th century, in corpus data from Spain and Mexico. Our analysis appeals to the concept of ‘attraction’ (De Smet et al., 2018) to account for the process of gradual convergence which occurred during the postmedieval period. Additionally, we identify a phenomenon of semantic specialization, with syntactic repercussions, inferable from patterns of usage corresponding to the 20th century.