Periphrastic Verb Phrases in Spanish:

20.a something that if I just never got to do,
This sounds like he really wanted to do it. From the context we can draw that that
is not necessarily the case. In fact, for the flow of the context, our earlier translation of
actually may be the best:
20.b something that ifl never actually did it...
This translation expresses that he thought a lot about doing it, but he never
actually did. The real sense of the passage is captured by this translation through the
word actually. Because for as much as he thought about it, he did not actually do it. And
that's what the phrase captures. 20b captures that well. Thus, no llegaf a does not
always indicate a frustration for not having gotten to do something. It can also indicate
the counterpart of llegar a, by simply meaning not actualized.
For almost any context, this periphrastic phrase has to be treated individually in
translation. There seems to be no lone method of translating it. This occurs with many of
these Spanish periphrastics, and is one of the main reasons so many linguists are studying
just what is beneath each phrase.
III. V IP Structu res
As we mentioned before in earlier sections, PV's include two basic types of
structures. In this section we will look at the V IP periphrastic structures and their
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