Languages, Volume 5, Issue 3
2020 September - 8 articles
Cover Story: How can we account for probabilistic patterns found in constituent order variation during language use? Usage-based linguistics offers deep insights into language structure by considering how speakers use language. This study examines Spanish variable clitic placement. A variationist study with a corpus of Argentine Spanish illustrates how the finite verb constitutes the top constraint impacting variable clitic placement. While grammaticalization accounts successfully explain most of the data, one frequent lexical construction (tener que ‘have to’ + infinitive) does not behave as predicted. Through an exemplar analysis of a larger corpus, it is shown that this variable construction retains analyzability and its component parts hold strong ties to another construction that is categorical with respect to clitic placement in a direction that explains the behavior of the variable construction. View this paper. - Issues are regarded as officially published after their release is announced to the table of contents alert mailing list .
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