Putting 'putting verbs' to the test of corpora

Constraints on verb-preposition combinations and of variations in the relation between object and destination point raise questions such as the following: How is it that two verbs semantically as close as put and place have different syntactic constraints in sentences such as: (a) X puts something into Y (b) ?? X places something into Y How is it that spray and load (both labelled as butting verbs') which are often compared and associated with the groups of Coil-verbs and Pour-verbs, in fact can be closer to Fill-verbs only because they display a quite similar behaviour in the nature of the link they maintain between their object and the destination? Based mainly on a quantitative study of the British National Corpus and the LOB, FLOB, Brown and Frown corpora, the work presented in this paper is an attempt to highlight how the prototypical verb put functions, in order to better understand the syntactico-semantic mechanisms which underlie the other verbs of this class. My ultimate purpose is to show that, beyond the classifications already proposed by various linguists, a new typology of putting verbs' can be outlined.