The romance future and conditional tenses are the result of the grammaticalization of Latin periphrasis, mainly cantāre habeō. In some medieval Romance languages, including Catalan, two types of forms existed: synthetic forms (faré &...
By conducting an apparent-time analysis of the OFROM corpus collected in Francophone Switzerland, this study examined the use of genre as discourse marker in the speech of 306 French L1 speakers. First, we examined the effect of extralinguistic facto...
Numeral incorporation describes the merging of a numeral sign with a lexical sign to create a single sign with a compositional meaning, e.g., “three weeks.” As a phenomenon of simultaneous morphology, numeral incorporation is unique to sign languages...
Every new phrasal preposition results from a process of grammaticalization, through which elements originally considered lexical acquire grammatical functions. At the same time, their complex status also entails a process of lexicalization, given tha...
The most generally accepted diachrony of mediante assumes a grammaticalization path that started in an absolute clause, which first evolved into a preposition, and later into conjunction. However, data reveals that its development is not connected to...
Compared to neighboring Romance languages, Galician currently maintains a more ubiquitous usage of the construction [haber (present) + (de) + infinitive] as a future marker in variation with the periphrastic construction with ir ‘go’ and...
This study investigates the contemporary grammaticalized uses of perdón (‘sorry’) in two varieties of Spanish, namely Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Methodologically, the investigation is based on a taxonomy of offenses, organized...
Grammaticalization has proven to be an insightful approach to semantic-morphosyntactic change within and across languages. Many studies, however, rely on assessing the large, obvious differences before and after the change. When investigating burgeon...
This study examines the grammaticalization of visual perception verbs in Hlai, a Kra–Dai language spoken on Hainan Island. Based on original fieldwork data, the paper identifies two core verbs of visual perception, zo33 and laai55, which differ...
Studies on the constitution of the Spanish periphrastic system show that there is a great ease with which verbal periphrases admit different lexical items in the second verb slot as they go through their grammaticalization process. However, it has no...
This paper offers the first long-range account of the grammaticalization of the Vietnamese perception verb thấy ‘see’ from the 13th to the mid-20th century. Using a balanced diachronic corpus of ten representative texts (1345 tokens...
Typological comparisons have revealed that signers can use manual elements and/or a non-manual marker to express standard negation, but little is known about how such systematic marking emerges from its gestural counterparts as a new sign language ar...
The so-called perífrasis perfectivas in Galician present the action as concluded or realized. This particular aspectual feature constitutes the common ground for an otherwise heterogeneous set of constructions, ranging from rematar de ‘f...
In contemporary Spanish, there are three types of sequences with consecutive meaning that contain the nouns forma, manera, modo, and suerte: the sequence de tal {forma/modo/manera/suerte} que, which forms part of a prepositional phrase that contains...
This paper discusses the emergence of a hortative marker in Guaraché, a new mixed language in Paraguay, the result of language mixing of the Indigenous Aché language and Paraguayan Guaraní. After settlement on reservations, the f...
This study examines the historical and functional divergence between two Spanish general extenders, y todo eso and y todo, in order to determine whether the loss of syntactic analyzability can serve as a criterion for distinguishing stages of grammat...
This study examines the diachronic development of Spanish perception verbs into deverbal topic markers (DTMs), focusing on tocar (‘to touch’), e.g., en/por lo que toca a, as representative of sensory perception. While the grammaticalizati...
In research on verbal periphrases, analyzability constitutes a central parameter, both for describing the grammaticalization processes to which these constructions are subject and for defining their categorical status. This paper focuses on a specifi...
This paper investigates the diachronic development of the sequence assim que (lit. ‘such that’) in the history of Portuguese, with a comparative perspective on the parallel construction así que in Spanish. A corpus-based approach w...
The focus in this corpus-based study is on a set of Spanish constructions formed with the verb of visual perception, ver ‘to See’, and a predicate adjective or participle. In addition to a clearly recognizable transitive schema, the set i...
This article examines the relationship between semantic and syntactic evolution in the development of three Spanish verbal constructions: verbal periphrases, pseudo-coordinative constructions (e.g., va y dice), and auxiliary chains. While theories of...
This paper describes the lexicalization processes of the expositive adverb yijing in Chinese, taking the view that the lexicalization of yijing has been achieved by both syntactic and semantic–pragmatic contexts. There are two key processes: th...
The Chinese language has witnessed remarkable changes in the past several decades, marked by a rapid rise of new words, frequent innovation of pseudo-affixes, and a notable increase in word length. By analyzing the creation, spread, and expansion of...
This study investigates the syntactic structure of negative particle questions (NPQs), also known as VP-NEG questions, in Sixian Hakka (a variety of Chinese spoken in Taiwan). We revisit the existing literature on Hakka NPQs, pointing out unresolved...
Over the last few decades, we have witnessed a proliferation in studies on phenomena such as grammaticalization (cf [...]
This paper sets out to investigate the modal uses of the lexeme hɒ3 ‘good’ in the Jidong Shaoxing variety of Wu and to reconstruct its grammaticalization pathway. Modal meanings of hɒ3 include circumstantial possibility, deontic...
The concept of verbal periphrasis has historically been a controversial one in Romance linguistics, especially in the Hispanic context, where there has been disagreement as to what multiverbal constructions should be considered periphrastic. One of t...
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...
This paper aims to (i) establish the micro-parametric variation in the development of the subjunctive CP in Romanian languages (Daco-Romanian/DR; Aromanian/AR; Megleno-Romanian/MR; Istro-Romanian/IR) and (ii) account for derivations in which the subj...
This study is concerned with the formal and functional development of the pragmatic marker not gonna lie. It comprises a detailed investigation into the usage and development of not gonna lie in American English. This study shows that not gonna lie d...
This work reports the results of quantitative, variationist analyses of two typologically unusual constructions in order to explore the grammatical conditioning of subject expression in non-finite clauses. Both constructions, Galician inflected infin...
“Z” is a young sign language developing in a family whose hearing members speak Tzotzil (Mayan). Three deaf siblings, together with an intervening hearing sister and a hearing niece, formed the original cohort of signing adults. A hearing...
Tags, compared to other types of pragmatic markers (PMs), are typically considered as separate yet related phenomena and are usually differentiated by their syntactic positions and discourse functions, among other factors. The current work explores t...
This paper describes the historical evolution of the Spanish causative micro-constructions with the motion verbs llevar (‘take’) and traer (‘bring’) (e.g., el miedo llevó al ladrón a cometer un error, ‘the...
Sinitic, often referred to simply as ‘Chinese’, is a well-differentiated major branch of the Sino-Tibetan family, further divided into ten commonly recognized groups (Mandarin, Jin, Wu, Gan, Xiang, Hui, Hakka, Yue, Min, and Pinghua), iden...
Grammaticalization has long been understood as a process that takes place gradually, but within it, discrete and abrupt changes take place. This tension has been reconciled by claiming that the semblance of a gradual process is given by different par...
The morpheme ‘give’ is among the most well-studied lexical items in the realm of grammaticalization. This study sets out to provide a typological and areal analysis of the distinct forms and multiple functions of ‘give’ in 27...
In recent decades, youth language has become one of the preferred research areas in sociolinguistics, not only because of its non-normative nature but mostly because it is recognized as a catalyst for language change. Since adolescents aspire to crea...
In this paper, I analyze, from a compositional perspective, the relevant features to construct the interpretation of immediate succession between a subordinate event and the event that takes place in the main sentence. Among all the components involv...
This paper seeks to address the relation between semantics, pragmatics and the productivity of a low level lexico-grammatical construction, Have the N (body part/attitude) to ↔metapragmatic comment. The question posed is how semantics affects pr...
In the pragmaticalization of ya ves que… ‘you see that…’, the perceptual basis of the verb becomes diluted, keeping its deictic profile. Most of its pragmatic values extend to non-perceptual phenomena, implying shared knowle...
In (colloquial) Italian, the fixed expression mi sa functions as an evidential/epistemic marker, requiring the dative 1SG clitic experiencer and the 3SG default form of the verb sapere. Mi sa diachronically develops from the verb for taste/smell, sap...
This paper investigates the syntax and diachrony of Italian causal clauses introduced by perché, siccome, and poiché. Although often treated as near-synonyms in Contemporary Italian, these subordinators differ systematically in their sy...
Languages vary in expressing reflexivity and reciprocity. In some languages, reflexive and reciprocal constructions are formally identical, while in some other languages, they are distinct. The third group comprises languages that have non-reflexive...
With the understanding that language variation, whether synchronic or diachronic, is, for the most part, not random but systematic and predictable, linguists and philologists have long engaged with the task of providing accounts and explanations for...
This paper examines the reportative evidential dizque in Andean Spanish as spoken in Ecuador and Peru. Taking, as a starting point, the synchronic and diachronic syntactic analyses of this type of markers in Romance that have been discussed in the li...
The chapter presents the current state of research concerning the development of the BE + past participle constructions from Latin to Spanish. Starting from the description in Rosemeyer (2014) and the theoretical background collated in Kailuweit and...
This study provides a usage-based analysis of Spanish Variable Clitic Placement (VCP). A variationist analysis of VCP in spoken Argentine Spanish indicates that VCP grammar is constrained by lexical (finite verb) and semantic (animacy) factors. Consi...
In this paper, the first-person plural diachronic behaviour of the verb form habemos with an existential value is analysed to explore its recovery in current Spanish as a case of refunctionalization. The latter is understood as timely cooptation of a...
This study is based on a sample of 30 Sinitic languages spoken in the Hunan Province. Its first objective is to explore the types of dative markers, comparing the form of the dative with allative, passive, benefactive, and differential object markers...
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