The dataset contains the quantitative data used to create the tables and graphics in het article "From breaking the silence to breaking to cry: verbs of destruction as productive source for the inchoative construction in Spanish". The data from the 21th century originates from the Spanish Web Corpus (esTenTen18), accessed via Sketch Engine. Only the subcorpus for European Spanish Data was selected. After downloading, the samples were manually cleaned. In the dataset, maximally 500 tokens were retained per auxiliary. For the earlier centuries, the data was extracted from the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (Corde). See Spanish_Destruction_Inchoatives_queries_20230306.txt for the specific corpus queries that were used.

The data were annotated for the infinitive observed after the preposition 'a' and for the semantic class to which this infinitive belongs, following the existing ADESSE classification (see below), besides other criteria that are not taken into account for this study. Concretely, the variables 'Century', 'Type', 'INF' (infinitive) and 'Class' were used as input for the analysis (see data-specific sections below for more information about the variables).