Studies in Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Grammaticalization, Refunctionalization and Beyond

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue examines the usefulness of a particular set of concepts and notions and their applicability to specific morphosyntactic changes in Spanish. The concepts we are referring to were proposed in the past 30 years in order to explain instances of language change for which grammaticalization theory could not provide a proper and satisfactory description. In his well-known and much-debated article of 1990, Lass launched the notion of exaptation, i.e. "the opportunistic co-optation of a feature whose origin is unrelated or only marginally related to its later use". A decade later, connecting with Lass' original idea, Pountain (2000) coined the term capitalization, to refer to "the historical process by which a linguistic feature which already exists in a language comes to be substantially exploited for wider purposes". Subsequently, Smith (2011) introduced the notions of refunctionalization and adfunctionalization in order to distinguish between cases of language change in which an original function was lost and those in which a new function was added to the original one. This Special Issue aims to make a contribution to the large number of studies that, over the years, have reviewed and explored the above-cited proposals and, at the same time, intends to enhance our knowledge of the evolution of the Spanish language.

Therefore, we welcome papers that address instances of language change in Spanish and discuss these changes in the light of the previously mentioned concepts.

Dr. Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen
Dr. Mar Garachana
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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