Diachronic aspects in phraseology: comparative analysis of two constructions with venga/vinga in Spanish and Catalan

In this paper, we analyze the chronological parallelism in the development of two phraseological units in Peninsular Spanish and Catalan that share the same semantic and pragmatic functions: venga/vinga (a) + infinitive and venga/vinga (de) + noun. In the semantic level, these constructions intensify an iterative action (before an infinitive) and nominal quantity (before a noun). Their pragmatic meaning encodes a negative assessment or complaint on the part of the speaker. The analysis of diachronic corpora explores the evolution of the Catalan constructions, and compares the findings with those in Garnes (2014, 2015) for the Spanish counterparts. The results of the analysis show that the Catalan constructions are reported in the corpus several decades earlier than in Spanish.