Having many meanings: A corpus study of Spanish EFL writers' construals with have

High-frequency verbs have attracted the attention of EFL researchers because learners have been found to both over- and under-use them. They are also interesting from the perspective of cognitive linguistics because of their polysemy, the result of a typical pattern of metaphorical/metonymical meaning extension. This paper undertakes a comparative cross-linguistic corpus analysis of the use of have in the academic writing in English by Spanish students of English philology, to determine whether the frequency patterns in their texts display over- or under-use of the verb in its various uses and senses. Possible explanations of the frequencies in the Spanish EFL texts are put forward and pedagogical solutions are suggested.