Grammatical Words and Spreading of Contexts: Evidence from the Spanish Preposition a
Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,Circuito Mario de la Cueva, s.n., Ciudad de la Investigación en Humanidades, Ciudad de México 04510, Mexico
Languages 2019, 4(1), 10; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4010010
Received: 2 January 2019
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Revised: 1 February 2019
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Accepted: 1 February 2019
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Published: 15 February 2019
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Studies in Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Grammaticalization, Refunctionalization and Beyond)
The paper shows that when grammatical words are involved, context is then the unit of language change. Certain changes consist in an active spreading of a form to new contexts, without changing the category or grammatical status of the form; in these cases, context must be considered the unit of language change. The empirical evidence is the diachrony of the Spanish preposition a ‘to’. Throughout history, this preposition pervasively extended to new and different contexts, but the form a never changed, remaining a grammatical preposition with a basic meaning of ‘directive telicity towards a goal’ (goal maybe locative, temporal, transitivity, finality, discursive, etc.). The paper labels this kind of change as ‘context construction’, and considers it an analogical extension induced by context. Finally, to test whether the diachrony of a is grammaticalization or not, the paper reviews fourteen related theoretical concepts, checking them against the diachronic evidence of the preposition a.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Company Company, C. Grammatical Words and Spreading of Contexts: Evidence from the Spanish Preposition a. Languages 2019, 4, 10. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4010010
AMA Style
Company Company C. Grammatical Words and Spreading of Contexts: Evidence from the Spanish Preposition a. Languages. 2019; 4(1):10. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4010010
Chicago/Turabian StyleCompany Company, Concepción. 2019. "Grammatical Words and Spreading of Contexts: Evidence from the Spanish Preposition a" Languages 4, no. 1: 10. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages4010010
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