Romance Historical Syntax: Special Issue on Syntactic Analyzability in Diachrony

Dear Colleagues,

Analyzability is a key concept in syntactic research in Romance languages and beyond. Langacker (1987: 292) defines this notion as the “recognition of the contribution that each component makes to the composite conceptualization”. Building on Langacker, Bybee (2010: 45) explains that it includes “the language user’s recognition of the individual words and morphemes of an expression as well as its morphosyntactic structure” and distinguishes it from semantic compositionality (cf. Traugott and Trousdale 2013 and Vincent 2015).

Diachronic changes in syntactic analyzability have featured prominently in research on the evolution of different types of (complex) expressions in Romance, such as prepositions, complementizers, light verb constructions, collocations, and idioms, among others (e.g., Fagard et al. 2020; Alba-Salas 2020; Amaral and Delicado Cantero 2022), typically relying on similar diagnostics (cf. Montoro del Arco 2006). The literature overlaps in certain aspects, particularly a general loss of syntactic freedom, but diverges in others, arguably due to different theoretical assumptions. Some studies emphasize the complete loss of internal syntax through a gradual process. Take, for instance, Torres Cacoullos’s (2006) usage-based/functionalist analysis of Spanish a pesar de ‘in spite of’ from a collocation to a single unit (see also Torres Cacoullos 2015 on the Spanish progressive and unithood and Lehmann 2019 on prepositions and univerbation). Other studies highlight the preservation of some internal syntax even in cases where constituents were recategorized as functional categories. Consider, for example, Roy and Svenonius’s (2009) formal analysis of complex prepositions as including a lexically reduced noun—akin to Svenonius’s (2006, 2010) AxParts—in a fully fledged phrasal projection (see also Vincent 2020).

The concept of syntactic analyzability has crucial theoretical implications for our diachronic and synchronic understanding of certain categories and expressions across all frameworks. It is tightly linked to other concepts such as lexicalization, grammaticalization, univerbation and de/recategorization, for example, in the case of discourse markers (Garachana Camarero 2008) and complementizers (Baunaz and Lander 2018; Manzini and Roussou 2020).

This Special Issue seeks to expand our empirical and theoretical understanding of syntactic analyzability in diachrony by bringing together researchers on historical romance syntax working within different frameworks. Key questions include, but are not limited to, the following:

• What new diachronic evidence is available to refine our understanding of syntactic analyzability and its loss over time? Are there new diagnostics for the loss of analyzability besides those already proposed in the literature? What counts as unambiguous evidence of absolute loss of syntactic analyzability, and why?
• How are the notions analyzability, complexity, and internal syntax best understood? How do new analyses of diachronic data bear on Langacker’s and Bybee’s definitions of analyzability? Is there a theoretical difference between internal syntax and syntactic analyzability? To what extent are the corresponding definitions dependent on theory-internal considerations, as opposed to broader conceptual issues?
• What new diachronic evidence might help illuminate the link between syntactic analyzability and related concepts such as grammaticalization, re/decategorization, univerbation, lexicalization, collocation, word, complex category, and syntactic unit, among others? Are concepts such as univerbation or syntactic fixation theoretically incompatible with internal syntactic structure?
• What is the theoretical link between the fine-grained syntactic studies of complex constructions proposed in some recent formal analyses and accounts of the loss of internal analyzability in the usage-based/cognitive/functionally-oriented literature? To what extent do formal and functionalist/cognitive perspectives on syntactic analyzability differ and overlap?
• How do historical changes in the meaning and distributional properties of elements in an expression contribute to the loss of syntactic analyzability of the expression as a whole? How do such developments reflect broader changes in the language(s) under consideration?

We welcome contributions addressing any of these questions in any Romance languages and varieties and from any theoretical perspective. Papers exploring, testing, and revisiting the conceptual/theoretical implications of the historical loss of syntactic analyzability with new empirical evidence are of particular interest, regardless of the categorial nature of the elements involved. Contributions from a single theoretical approach are welcome; (single- or co-authored) papers that combine or discuss formal and functionalist analyses are highly encouraged.

Tentative completion schedule:

• Abstract submission deadline: 17 February 2025
• Notification of abstract acceptance: 2 April 2025
• Full manuscript deadline: 21 October 2025

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors ([email protected]; [email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts (word limit: 8000-12000 words) will undergo double-blind peer review.

Dr. Manuel Delicado Cantero
Prof. Dr. Josep Alba-Salas
Guest Editors

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• syntactic analyzability
• internal syntax
• Romance syntax
• diachronic syntax
• re/decategorization
• complex construction
• univerbation
• syntactic freedom